Market Understanding (Perspectives)

Jul

Just Say No to the Wrong Customer

By Susan Hamilton · Comments (0)

Gerald Voigt, co-founder of Zero To Sixty Marketing LLC and owner of Hawkeye’s Hobbies and Images by Hawkeye, lends his thought-provoking perspective to marketing in the micro to small business arena. In this post he describes some negative tendencies to be recognized and avoided by companies offering B to B services.

The customer is never wrong.

Well that may be true, but it doesn’t necessarily mean each customer is right, for you. Recently I was approached by a prospective client who was asking for assistance with marketing his business. I listened to him explain everything that he felt was wrong with all aspects relating to his business and its operations, mostly external. This lit the master caution light in my mind. Sure, there are those clients who just don’t start out running their businesses very well, and they struggle along the way. Some crash immediately after takeoff, yet some manage to get a little air, but no significant altitude.

Timeless Marketing Principles – Part 1

By Shari Voigt · Comments (0)

It’s fun to focus on the new and different, but it’s important not to forget the tried and true. Small businesses have established themselves and grown in the marketplace since the dawn of capitalism, not just since the birth of Facebook. Along the way, what works and what doesn’t work has been studied and written about. Effective marketing has been dissected and diagrammed. It’s true that HOW we get the job done has changed, but the timeless principles relating to market, message and media are still the foundation for success.

Books of the Past With that in mind, today’s post begins a new series. We’re going to look at those timeless principles and relate them to how we market today. What nuggets of wisdom can we glean from the advertising giants of the past? What can we learn from today’s experts? Note that I didn’t say “from today’s self-proclaimed Internet marketing ‘gurus’ who like to brag about working from home in their pajamas.”

We have real-world businesses, whether they be home-based or brick and mortar. We have families, employees or independent contractors who count on us, and customers who depend on us to get the job done right the first time. Somewhere along the line, we know that to grow we HAVE to make time to market our businesses. In other words, we don’t need hype. We need to spend our limited time doing those things that have been proven to work. Even as a virtual marketing firm, where our specialty is to help YOU market your business, we struggle to find time to market ourselves consistently.

Today’s question strips away any assumptions. It’s as basic as you can get.

Have you identified your target market? You may feel that everyone has a need for your product or service, but that’s not the same thing. To market effectively and be COST effective, we need to know exactly who’s attention we’re trying to gain. Take a few moments to write down everything you can think of about your target customer group, including: age, gender, location, health, profession, interests and affiliations. Seriously, do this little exercise today. Next Monday, we’ll start with that very important data and move onto our next timeless marketing tip.

What is your biggest marketing challenge? We’d love to hear from you in the comments, below:

Photo Credit: Lin Pernille on flickr

Mar

Where Do You Stand on That?

By Susan Hamilton · Comments (0)

I bet if you were hanging out with your friends or family and a controversial subject came up, whether you voiced it or not – you’d probably have an opinion about it. Conversationally, it’s a plus to be able to debate opinions or discuss facts in a give and take manner. Some folks can’t do that. But if you’re the entrepreneur who generally reads our blogs, you can probably hang with the best.

If you have ideas for business – something not agreeable in the mainstream – instead of sitting there with your opinion safely tucked inside your head in a box labeled, “not politically correct,” I want to encourage you to take action. Take a risk by doing or saying something out of the norm that can be useful to others. It could be the thing that makes your business stand out.
building-success
I talk about my Dad a lot. He’s been fighting cancer for a couple of years so he’s on our minds around here. Growing up, he would talk about peer pressure, and he would tell us that people loved to have something to talk about, there was always going to be somebody that everyone would put on a pedestal. He said that if we desired that position, many opportunities for compromise would take us down until we were just like everyone else. Instead, he suggested, we should be ourselves the best we could be and not conform our opinions and behavior based on what everybody else thought. If that behavior brought attention our way, we’d soon see others imitating us.

It is okay to be different, to look at things differently, and to market ourselves differently. It’s actually the only successful way to do it.

Unless you buy a franchise … but even then, you’ll have to take a stand on something once and awhile … and they’re mongo-expensive. I think that might have been how garlic-Parmesan chicken wings began. Or the Slurpee.

Take a stand. Someone in your industry is standardizing stupidity in some way, point it out and do it entirely different. Just because people have become used to a dumb way to do things doesn’t mean your company has to be run that way.

Have you been told that what you’re doing won’t work? Have you resigned yourself to redundant or useless practices merely because that’s how its done? Are you listening to your gut, or following your nose?

Look, we don’t believe a ton of what marketers are saying these days. So much ridiculous, unrealistic B.S. is associated with social media marketing and SEO – there are simply smarter ways to do those things that need to be done. I don’t want to work 14 hours every day, do you? Secret: you don’t have to.

In your business, get rid of stuff that ties your stomach in knots. Oh, occasionally those times will come up, but if those types of things are happening on a regular basis, find a better way to do them or cut them out. Don’t do business in a certain way just because that’s all you know. Figure out how to do that thing smarter.

To wrap it up: have an opinion, take a stand, figure out how to do that thing better, and listen to your gut.

And when someone asks you, “Where do you stand on that?” you’ll be able to respond with less irritation, and more inspiration.

How do you feel about the marketing strategies you’re hearing online? Do you find our posts informative or helpful? Do you think we sound just like everyone else? Leave us a comment, we’d love to hear from you.

Oct

Small Business Marketing: It’s Not About You!

By Shari Voigt · Comments (0)

It’s so easy and dangerous to get caught up in and pulled into a small, confining box by the thing you sell. Your product, your service, your place. Easy to forget how little anybody cares about that, when you care about it so much.” ~ No B.S. Insider’s Connection, September 2009 Edition

Road Sign It’s no secret that we no longer do business the same way. Price comparisons are easy on the Internet. It’s where we do our research before making the purchase. Price drives customer choice, making yesteryear’s value proposition irrelevant. Yes, thanks to the Internet and intense competition from previous non-contenders, many products and services have become commodities. This changes everything.

Competing with Loss Leaders

For example, the plumbing shop selling quality fixtures now competes with loss leaders at Home Depot, Lowes, or any number of Internet stores, even when the end result is MORE expensive for the customer. Consider the time spent comparison shopping, only to learn later that the faucet you bought uses plastic, throw-away parts that can’t be repaired by your local plumber , or the low-priced water heater you purchased isn’t really that simple to install. Ever try to solder a pipe when the water shut-off doesn’t quite stop the trickle of water?

What about the hobby industry? At last year’s iHobbyExpo in Chicago, brick and mortar retailers expressed outrage over the abundance of inexpensive hobby products available online. “We can’t compete!” was their battle cry.

Another relevant example is in the specialty sign industry. Customers tend to research their options online, but make their purchase with the lowest price vendor. Service for that sign isn’t even on their radar.

Examples of this are rampant in our own industry. Some will always view copywriting, graphic design, and website development as commodities. You CAN buy it cheaper in India, the Phillipines or Vietnam. Some of it is even good! Much of it isn’t.

Adapt to the Changing Marketplace

In each of these examples, the businesses that will make it are those who step back, remind themselves “It’s not about me,” and adapt to the changing marketplace. Get over you. Get into them! What does your market want? What do they need? How can you help?

The plumbing shop with an educational blog and a strong Internet presence is head and shoulders above the competition. They can use that blog to educate potential customers about the difference between quality and throw-away parts. Tell readers how to do it themselves … once we see all the work that’s involved, we’re more likely to call you than actually do it! The key is a strong Internet presence. Remember that we research our options online. We’ve got to find you on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Once we find you, reel us in with your information, your personality, your work ethic, a great offer we’ll still remember 30 days down the road. Get us on your email list. We may still buy our next toilet at Home Depot, but when we can’t get the darned thing to stop leaking, you can bet we’ll be calling you.

Likewise, to the hobby retailer with no Internet store … why not add e-commerce to your business plan? What’s stopping you from competing on the Internet retailer’s turf? If that’s where your market is buying, why are you resisting something so fundamental? Get on the bus!

You may have noticed that we’ve taken our own advice. One of our markets is the small business who needs help, but has a very limited marketing budget. We’ve addressed that need in three different ways:

As a virtual marketing firm, we have little overhead and we pass our savings on to our customers.
We offer affordable small business acceleration packages, designed to provide the most bang for the least buck.
Do-it-yourself marketing solutions are our recommendations for quality, vetted marketing products, ones that we use ourselves. We earn a small commission on each sale, making it possible for us to offer ongoing education in this format.

What are you doing to adapt to the changing needs of your market? How has your market changed in the past few years? What would you like to see more of in Inside Line?

Photo Credit: .Larry Page on flickr

Mar

The Customer is Right

By Scott Alberts · Comments (2)

The customer may not be infallible (like you or I?), but it’s a safe bet they know a lot more about their own business than I do. It’s my job to help them realize their vision, not mine. We’re building their brand, not my portfolio. As competition gets more fierce (or if you will, as marketing dollars get more scarce), even established ad agencies are acknowledging that customers must have the final “say” in their own brand.

Too many of my business customers have told me how they do not like their logo or their web site, and by extension the letterhead, cards, and all the matching materials … but they’ve already spent THAT part of their budget. (If only I had a dollar — okay, the long-gone thousand dollars — for every time I heard that!)

It has been a running joke between Home Things! owner Andrea Hogan and I, that I just didn’t “get” the logo that we created. But she loves it, her customers love it, and for some reason women in general — her target market — loves it. Why should I argue? A satisfied, loyal customer is a wonderful thing!

A very interesting discussion, “Ode to the amateur logo” is still underway at Before & After. Check it out for a revealing insight into both the designer’s and the customer’s perspective.

View additional logos designed by Scott Alberts.

Mar

What Do You Mean, Ethical Marketing?

By Susan Hamilton · Comments (0)

I’m often involved in conversations with small business owners regarding their marketing materials, and lately I’ve notice a disturbing trend. There’s an ever increasing gap between companies who hold integrity dear, and the companies that they compete with. Reputable companies competing with their unscrupulous adversaries leave the consumer/client with little to go on but what’s provided in promotional material. Now your potential customer has to dig pretty deep to know who’s good for what, and you’re left with two large responsibilities–business ethics and conveying them.

When you provide a service or product that exceeds client expectation, you increase your competitive edge by a wide margin. When they can see it coming because of the way you present yourself, it’s an even wider gap.

Conversely, if you haven’t taken the time to update your service or product offerings and then market them to the best of your ability, you cheat both your client and your company.

The conundrum in the world of writing copy appears to be the same as in the IT staffing business. Getting your audience to understand your message is the key. Not just ‘putting it out there’ by using the right words and phrases, (of course, that is what we do here at ZTSM!), but taking that extra step to ensure your potential client ‘gets it.’ That actually involves quite a bit of internal communication to accomplish.

I was talking to Mike Hanes, President of ProVisionTech Group , about this just the other day. He stands strong against unethical business practices in the IT professional staffing circuit.

In an effort to boost quota, many recruiting/staffing agencies will pass along unqualified candidates for IT positions. Looking the other way is fairly common within the IT staffing community because:

There are fewer and fewer qualified professionals to choose from, and
Filling positions accurately depends on every member of the recruiting team understanding the same evolving language.

Mike and I bonded over that element. We both feel our companies operate with integrity and fill a lacking need–effective communication both internally (between co-workers), and externally (from our services to our client base). We agree that one of the largest barriers to serving our respective communities exists when the people we know we can help, have been burned by previous experiences.

How do your potential customers/clients know they can trust you?

Make sure your clients know exactly what you stand for through your presentation. If as a nation we’re ever going to re-establish trust in the marketplace, we’d better make sure we’re holding fast to ethical business practices, and we’d better make sure our clients know it!

Photo Credit: @N03/2987872496/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">eeekay’s photography on flickr

Mar

Beware of Bloodsucking Plagiarists

By Susan Hamilton · Comments (0)

MacroMosquito by Wendy on Flickr

Last weekend, on a routine check of our copy productivity, Shari and I were going over analytics and realized that an unusually high number of republishing had occurred on a lesser known article I’d submitted to Ezines before Christmas.

We had been supplying content for our pet project on http://educationalhobbiesblog.com, and bringing awareness to our work through our favorite article directory, EzineArticles.com. One thing we enjoy about that medium is the ability to offer our work publicly, and then retain the credit for researching and writing the piece when it’s republished by another content provider, whether news magazine or blog site. It’s good for our company to have our names associated with our published works, and this is one of the methods we offer our customers who are looking for blog and website traffic building through social media. Many companies don’t have the time to market their expertise through copy the way we can for them.

Some submissions are more effective than others, and we learn from each scenario what better to do next time, and repeat effective strategies. I believe that’s called business marketing! We always walk away with information, one way or another. We sure learned a thing or two this past weekend.

Although several months had passed, and we were well overdue for our quarterly check, we decided to check up on the articles and see if they had been published elsewhere. Not expecting much due to our more pressing projects this first quarter, we were pretty amazed to find it had been republished 238 times. That’s darn good for a pre-Christmas article discussing the buying trends of remote control hobbies! It didn’t make sense, and it didn’t take long to figure out why.

Apparently a guy by the name of Ronald Eapen decided to take my article, slough off the title, use my topic sentence as the new title, and republish my article under his name, taking all the credit for himself. This man then superlinked the material to his easy money making scheme which was totally content unrelated. 238 times he had submitted that article to every known reputable and otherwise article directory and linked back to a page containing otherwise unrelated content and offered yet another link to his easy money scheme.

Every article was heavily endowed with every social bookmarking plugin and affiliate link you could think of. And he’s been making money off my content for the past three months, giving me no credit or kickback for my word-for-word duplication.

People, I clearly copyrighted that work under Zero To Sixty Marketing!

We spent several hours tracking my article from directory to directory, demanding credit and compensation. We also learned who we will consider credible article submission directories for the future! After sending him personal comments on every article that was set up for comments, I remembered we had a friend in the copyright infringement business. Its clearly time to talk to him!

GoArticles promptly removed the content and sent us email confirmation. That was pretty cool. Soon we’ll know who else was willing to comply with copyright law.

Long and short of it, make sure you are being vigilant about protecting your work. It’s not bad to have your work republished all over, that’s pretty much the goal when you’re building you’re reputation. Thing is, you’re reputation is shot when a disreputable person uses it for spamming and the promise of easy money for his customers. If I hadn’t copyrighted my work like this:

or even just used the word Copyright, the year, and name, I wouldn’t have had the legal right to demand that my name be associated with my work, my work remain unchanged, and compensation for monies earned. That doesn’t mean I’ll ever see a dime. This was small potatoes. But he had everything in place to be well on his way to monetizing my work under his name. Totally uncool.

To recap: beware of bloodsucking plagiarists.

Photo Credit: @N00/266164980/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Wendy on Flickr

Related Article: One Minute With Plagiarism

Mar

Comparing Link to Ink

By Shari Voigt · Comments (0)

If you market to other businesses on any level, and haven’t yet subscribed to B2B Magazine, you’re missing out. We receive both the print and online versions, and tend to read them cover-to-cover each month. Today’s issue just arrived in the mail, and the first thing to catch my eye was the “New Channels” column by Paul Gillin, titled “New PR Reality: Link over Ink.”

Gillen hits the nail on the head when he says that “clients and executives mumble ‘That’s nice’ about a Web link, but get excited about a reference in their daily Wall Street Journal.” We’ve definitely found this to be true. But the rules have changed, and one or two good links can now return far greater results than a mention in the most prominent print publication.

It’s a rare business that won’t find its audience online these days. Unfortunately, it’s also a rarity for small businesses to know how to get found online. Publishing a Web site or starting a blog is not enough. Adding your Web address to your print marketing collateral is not enough. Sending out press releases that mention your business or your site … even that is not enough. Don’t neglect any of those activities, but to achieve your online objectives, you’re going to need links … quality, inbound links from other Web sites, blogs, social networks, and relevant directories.

How many times in the past month have you searched for something you read about in a newspaper or magazine? Ok, now how many times have you followed a link from Google or from within a blog or other online article? Is there any comparison?

By the way, you can subscribe to B2B Magazine and a variety of other useful trade publications for free at www.tradepub.com.

Nov

Timing Of Your Marketing Message

By Gerald Voigt · Comments (1)

It is a cold and blustery Saturday morning, so it is a good time to catch up on some of the things I’ve been meaning to get done. One such item is catching up on reading through a few of the trade publications that came in this week’s mail.

As I was thumbing through one particular publication something familiar struck me. On a recent trip to somewhere we needed to go, my wife and partner commented about a billboard advertisement. It created a little conversation about how much has changed in the past few weeks, but after looking through a few trade publications and magazines it suddenly sparked an important thought.

Is it Time-Sensitive?

Many messages we wish to convey to our customers are time-sensitive. Our business environment is always changing and lately it changes with each blink of an eye. Let’s look at the one that sparked this particular post…gasoline prices.

Current Events are … Current!

The billboard and the ads in the magazines were centered on gasoline prices being at all time highs. In a print media there is a lead time between when the ad is conceived and when it is presented to the consumer. The same thing goes for billboards.

Factor In Lag Time For Print Media

In this particular case, both are touting the high price of gasoline. Although this was a major concern just a few weeks ago, in the blink of an eye prices are nearing record lows by comparison. Gas was over four dollars a gallon; now it is just under two dollars (in Neenah, Wisconsin) so the message has lost a great portion of its intended impact. Sure, it serves as a reminder of what the prices were, but for the most part consumers live in the present. If the message wasn’t written to be a reminder, it too will lose its impact towards the market it was intended to reach.

Timing is everything. Remember that print media of any kind has a lag factor associated with it. Broadcast media is nearly instant. New media (Twitter, Facebook, all forms of social media) message can be updated with just a few keystrokes or even by cell phone. Make sure you consider the timeliness of your message before selecting your media venue.

Sep

Your Customers’ Perception Of You Is Your Brand

By Gerald Voigt · Comments (1)

When sales decline, budgets tighten and typically, the first area to be scrutinized for cutback is promotion and marketing. Part of the magic of marketing is the ability to create perception. Businesses must create and maintain a perception that they are critical, viable and resilient.

An example of this is your local auto dealership. Even when sales are in a slump, they continue to run weekly ads in local newspapers. Why? To maintain their customers’ perception that things are just fine. Of course the automobile is an intricate part of the American psyche. Give the perception that the local automobile dealership isn’t viable and the ripple effect can reach far and wide.

If your business wasn’t perceived as resilient, what would your customers likely do? Keeping customers aware of your products, services and existence is crucial especially during tough times. When the situation improves, you’ll be clearly visible as the “go to” resource that is ready to meet the customer’s needs.

We’re not advocating a continuation of a full speed ahead, spare the expense approach. You will have to adjust and tweak to work within a leaner budget. With the right strategic mix, the perception can be maintained that you are viable and ready to serve. Do not let your customers lose sight of your business. What’s the saying…”Out of sight out of mind.”

Remember that your customers’ perception of you IS your brand. Your brand image is far more than your logo, store front, and marketing collateral. It’s how your customers and potential customers perceive everything about your business.

So when the budget belt tightens, a sound marketing strategy is key to both short and long term business goals. Perception can work for or against your company. Make sure to keep it working for you.

Can you afford not to?

Email Marketing Made Easy

Subscription Options

Just Say No to the Wrong Customer

Timeless Marketing Principles – Part 1

Where Do You Stand on That?

Small Business Marketing: It’s Not About You!

Competing with Loss Leaders

Adapt to the Changing Marketplace

The Customer is Right

What Do You Mean, Ethical Marketing?

Beware of Bloodsucking Plagiarists

Comparing Link to Ink

Timing Of Your Marketing Message

Is it Time-Sensitive?

Current Events are … Current!

Factor In Lag Time For Print Media

Your Customers’ Perception Of You Is Your Brand

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