Entrepid

Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 and Newt Barrett of Content Marketing Today have teamed up to write "Get Content.  Get Customers.", a guide for content marketing.

They’ve put up a companion blog for the book and will give you a free sample.  Check it out.

Next, Conversation Starter has advice on How to Reward (and Retain) People When Money Is Tight.  Here’s a snippet:

• Responsibility along with empowerment is the best motivator
• Recognition inspires, not only the recipient but also others
• Different people see value in different things, so one should strive to understand what is important to individuals working for you. This is especially critical when working in an unfamiliar cultural environment.

Lastly, Jeff Cornwall of The Entrepreneurial Mind says: "Turn Your Competitors into Your Sales Force."

What seems like crumbs to them can become your feast.

Read the whole thing to see what he means.

Seth Godin asks: Do You Own Trees?  He uses the example of Newspapers being stuck on the idea that their value is in the physical form (i.e. Dead Trees) rather than the information. 

Of course, it’s easy in hind-sight to see the mistakes that the newspaper industry is making, but what about you?

Of course, there are trees in your business too. There are trees in the photography business (chemicals) and in the music business (plastic) and even in the personal computer business (computers). They may not be called trees, but they’re there.

This idea is worthy of some discussion.  Have any trees in your business you’d care to share?

The MarketingProfs give us Five Inexpensive Direct Mail Tools to Generate Sales Leads Fast.

My favorite counter-intuitive Tool: Special Delivery.  You’ll have to read the article to see how this can be inexpensive - and effective.

Finally, John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing advises Creative Emulation as a means to innovation.

Some of the best marketing innovations I have witnessed came about by some smart marketer emulating a concept long established in one industry and brining it over to another.

Happy Hours for florists?  How ’bout Ladies’ Night for dentists?

Chip and Dan Heath, writing in Fast Company, show us "How to sway people’s decisions with the gentlest of nudges."

The basic premise is that people can be influenced to make a decision by how the default position is crafted.

Because inertia is so crucial, world-class nudgers recognize that the default option is critical. Chances are, you weren’t craving the USA Today that came with your last hotel stay, but you just couldn’t be bothered to call the front desk and reclaim your $0.75. (Notice that if the default option were reversed, and you had to call to get your copy, there’d be more trees and fewer infographics in the world.)

Ethics Alert:  if you become one of the "world-class nudgers", remember to use your powers only for good, never evil.

Next, Newt Barrett of Content Marketing Today expands on the recent trend of the internet lengthening the buying process.

This is horrendous news for you if:

• You have no web presence.
• Your website does not make it easy for visitors to find exactly the solution they are seeking.
• Your website does not contain intrinsically valuable content that will put you at the top of the list of potential suppliers.
• Your only e-mail communications with your buyers are self-promoting and irrelevant to their information needs.

Finally, John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing says that public speaking is a competetive marketing skill for any and all entrepreneurs.

When you have to get your thoughts down into a concise 30 minute talk and then go out and get instant, sometimes too truthful, feedback it develops character and poise along with an improved message.

Be sure to follow the link to the podcast interview with Tom Antion.

Clate Mask, posting at Small Business Trends, cautions against On Again, Off Again marketing.

His first point:

You are a marketer, not a provider of product x or service y. You are a marketer.

There’s more, so be sure to read the whole thing. 

Next, Paul Michelman, posting on HBR’s Conversation Starter, tells us How to Resist the Urge to Overreach.

We all need to take a cold hard look at our spheres of responsibility and make sure we’re dedicating the right resources and attention to the right things. Have you taken on too many responsibilities? Could burnout affect your performance and your ability get the most from your part of the organization? It serves no one best interests to let that happen. More so, when your performance suffers, you lose control of your agenda. (emphasis mine)

This is a problem I see consistently with my business owner clients.  They have 50 things on their To Do list and every single one of them is urgent.  Then, on top of that, they have a dozen new products or services that they want to introduce by next week.  It’s a recipe for losing focus at a minimum, and, in the worst case, serious burnout.

Finally, a little levity from Donald Luskin at Chronicle of the Conspiracy.  He offers up a few pics from the road in California.

My question is this:  Is the owner of the car in pic #1 being ironic?  Since it’s California, you can’t be sure.

Pic #2 is a perfect example of my personal philosophy that there are a million ways to make an honest dollar.

Words of wisdom from Seth Godin: "If it gets to the RFP stage, you lost."

Sam Decker has posted his unpublished book 193 Creative Marketing Ideas for everyone to read for free.  With 193 ideas, not everything will work for everyone, but everyone can find several very good ideas to market their businesses for not a whole lot of money.

Seth Godin says that when customers complain, your response should be: "You’re Right."  He is NOT saying the customer is always right - read the whole thing to see what he means.

Finally, MarketingProfs gives us a simple way to use flowcharting to increase the effectiveness of our lead-generation efforts in Lead Generation Blueprints.  Spending a half-hour or so thinking about HOW you generate leads and WHAT you’re going to do with them will increase your return on investment of time and money.

Firstly, Michael Roberto in Conversation Starter gives his take on Growth During a Recession.

He has 4 dead-on points, and here’s one I didn’t think of for my series on Surviving and Thriving in a Recession:

…identify your most critical suppliers and distributors, and determine if any face the possibility of severe impairment to their business due to the economic downturn.

Next, Peter Paul Roosen and Tatsuya Nakagawa offer us "Give Yourself a Productivity Boost: Learn from Kodak’s Transformation" in Lifehack.

They interviewed Jeff Hayzlett and David Lanzillo of Kodak about their F.A.S.T program.  "A" is for Accountability and "S" is for Simplicity - and in my view Simplicity makes Accountability a whole lot easier.  It’s to easy to dodge responsibility when you can hide behind complexity.

Finally, BusinessPundit tells us how entrepreneurs can use social media in The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Social Media.  The post has links to a number of resources, so you might want to save a copy to your desktop.

The beginning of the series can be found here.

This post is about marketing in a recession.

Don’t Be Timid

Businesses that survive and thrive during slow-downs, and become even stronger during recoveries, are the ones who aren’t afraid to go after growth when their competitors are hunkering down.

Preserving profits and cash flow is important, and cost management (see Part 2) is an integral part of your recession-proofing strategy, but sustainable long-term financial health can only come by increasing revenues.

Identify Ideal Customers

Every business has an ideal customer type and you probably already have some on board, although you could use more.  Take a look at your customers and see who is profitable, who improves your cash flow by paying on time and who doesn’t take up your valuable time by making unreasonable demands on your customer service infrastructure.

After examining your customers for the above, look for common characteristics. 

• Are they large volume buyers or small? - a large group of small buyers can be very profitable because they don’t expect volume discounts.
• Are they repeat buyers?  - why or why not?
• Do they have similar demographics?  - age, gender, income level, etc. for consumers;  industry, revenue size, geography, etc. for businesses.
• How did they come to be your customers? - referral, advertisement, walk-in, etc. (more on this below)
• Do they tend to buy the same product or service?
• {insert your particulars here}

Fire The Bad Customers

This may seem contradictory - firing customers at the same time you’re trying to grow revenue.  However, bad customers can not only suck up profits, but they can put stress on your business that you don’t need at this time.

Would you rather have a $1 million business with $100k in profits, work 80 hours a week and have stressed-out employees…or…a $900k business with $150k in profits, happy employees and time to spend with your family?

Take the extra time, money and energy you’ll get by firing bad customers and go find some good ones.

Find Out What Works For Your Business

Just about every business, from the smallest to the largest, has some marketing techniques that are effective and some not so much.  The trick, however, is to know which are which.

Start with the information you gathered about your ideal customers and see if you can determine which marketing efforts brought you the best customers.  Since you want more of these kind of customers, this would be the logical place to expand your efforts.

Test.  And Test Some More 

Gathering information and looking for patterns is just hypothesis forming.  You have an educated guess, but not real evidence. 

If you think an ad in a particular publication is pulling in customers, run it one week and not the next.  Rinse and repeat. 

The same can be done with online pay-per-click advertising.  And search-engine-optimization.  And…just about anything you can think of.  The key is to start out with an educated guess and then test to see if you’re right.

Ruthlessly Eliminate Ineffective Marketing

If you have marketing efforts that aren’t bringing in enough of the right kind of customers, STOP.  Why would you spend the time and money on activities that don’t bring in customers, or worse, bring in the wrong ones?

Chances are, you’re doing it because you don’t know which marketing activities bring in the good customers and which don’t.  If you do your testing, you’ll no longer be marketing in the dark.

See Make Your Marketing Budget Work—Halve It  for some more ideas on  eliminating ineffective marketing.

Use Guerrilla Techniques

Marketing doesn’t have to be expensive.  Jay Conrad Levinson coined the term and created the system called Guerrilla Marketing and has a wealth of advice on his site to help you create smart marketing on a tight budget.  I recommend signing up for his newsletter.

What’s nice about GM is that it works well in a testing methodology - you can experiment with several different ideas without spending a lot of money.

Here’s the wikipedia page for Guerrilla Marketing.  And here’s the official Guerrilla Marketing website with easy sign-up for the newsletter.

Now, go forth and market…smartly!

Conversation Starter, the free online companion to Harvard Business Review, has a long blog post / short essay on Staples attempt at new strategic innovation.

You should read the whole thing, but here are some nuggets:

…all strategies have a sell-by date. Just because you were a successfully disruptive business doesn’t mean you can’t fall victim to the same forces. Competitors will come, and absent entry barriers, they can simply copy what you’ve successfully done (without all that time-wasting analysis and experimentation to figure out the model, too).

Call that the Microsoft strategy.

Customers will — most irritatingly — take what used to excite them in the past for granted.

Remember, your customer is not your friend.  At its core, the customer-vendor relationship is a commercial one, and the minute you cease to provide value to the customer, they will depart.

But, no law says you have to do business with customers who don’t bring value to you as well.  A healthy business relationship is one in which both sides win.

Earlier this week I was in the market for a trailer hitch. The automobile dealer wanted about 3 times what I thought was a fair price (Hello, Volvo?) and I heard from a couple of people that U-Haul did a good job at a reasonable price.

U-Haul can tell you on their website which locations are nearby and what services they offer. Some only rent trucks, so I could bypass them. With a list of phone numbers I proceeded to call the locations that offered trailers and trailer hitches.

Unfortunately, not all locations offering trailer hitches had “trailer hitch mechanics” on site to install them. And the ones with mechanics couldn’t get to me for at least three weeks.

After an hour’s worth of research online and another hour of unsuccessful telephone conversations I gave up and decided to take a different direction. I was prepared to spend money with U-Haul, but they made it next to impossible to do so. They could have made it easy.

How difficult would it be to show online which locations actually install trailer hitches. And, how difficult would it be to show available times and allow me to book an appointment online? Making it easy for me would have created a happy customer for U-Haul.

Also, as a highly motivated buyer with a deadline I would have been willing to pay extra for speedy service. Are trailer hitch mechanics so valuable that the company can’t get one to work an hour of overtime for a customer willing to pay an extra $50 or $75?

I’m not singling out U-Haul, we’ve all had experiences with businesses making it difficult to spend money with them. If I had one piece of advice it would be this:

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Attempt a buying transaction with your own company and see where the kinks are. You might just be surprised.