Saturday, February 24, 2007

Instigator Blog


There's an awful lot of blogs out there and while I'm pleased you're having a quick look at mine I also like to point out new ones I come across that are worth a visit.

On that point I'd certainly recommend Ben Yoskovitz' Instigator Blog.

Described as 'instigating discussion, ideas and better business' Ben's blog covers an eclectic range of business based topics and is all the more readable and interesting for it. Definitely worth a look.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Customer service - is it broken?


I just finished an interesting post on Seth Godin's blog where he suggests a new approach to customer service.

Of course, I'm a big fan of good customer service - for me it's the fundamental that underlines word-of-mouth and referrals; more so than the product, price, whatever. But like so much of what I'd consider marketing (i.e. everything) being good isn't really good enough. It's phenomenal service that makes your business stand out - people already expect good.

So what does it take to provide phenomenal customer service?

Of course, we'd all like our problems dealt with on the spot but as Seth rightly suggests what's more important is that they actually get dealt with. I'm constantly amazed by how long it takes some companies to get back to me with quotes, or answers to questions or to reply to a problem - but much more frustrating is that even when they do come back they rarely deal with my concern or query the way I'd hope.

Simple tip: Fast is good but right is phenomenal.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

What do YOU do?

Here's a simple question; What do YOU do?

The question may be simple but what about the answer. When you meet someone for the first time, or need to describe your business in a signature line or tagline, you don't have the time to deliver a five minute explanation about the intricacies of your industry.

We've all heard about an elevator pitch but what about an elevator sentence? Can you describe your business in one sentence? If not, here's a useful exercise.

For your short explanation start by writing a paragraph that explains it all including the key ebenfit you offer
FreeForm provide marketing services including ...... to small businesses and startups in the UK, Ireland and beyond - helping them market themselves better. We specialise in low cost and no cost marketing ideas.... and you should use us because [benefit]....

Then edit that down to a sentence or two by picking out the fundamentals
FreeForm provide support and advice to small businesses to help them market better. You should use us because [benefit]....

Then edit those sentences down to one
We help small businesses market better without breaking the bank to do it.

Then, if need be down to a few keywords, plus a key benefit
Market better without breaking the bank.
Better marketing.
Better marketing on a budget.


You'll end up with a few descriptions that you can use in different circumstances, but more importantly, a clear picture of what you do and how to explain it.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Remind me who you are again

15 minute idea

We'd all like to think that our businesses are unforgetable but a quick run through your old emails will quickly remind you just how many people you don't remember. If you can forget them, they can forget you.

As part of your overall marketing strategy you should find ways to remind people who you are and what you do from time to time. Here's a couple fo quick ideas:

A newsletter
A personal email to see 'how things are going' with them
A comment on their blog or reply to a forum post
A handwritten note
A quick phone call

Trawl through your emails and other communications from the last year (or at least a few months) and find a dozen people you haven't spoken to in a while. They don't have to be clients or customers - they could be a reporter, a friend of a friend, someone who made an enquiry, whatever. Make it your goal to get in touch in the next 2 weeks.

Monday, February 19, 2007

5 Marketing Sins to Avoid

Five Deadly Marketing Sins

Sometimes avoiding bad marketing is just as important as doing good marketing. Avoiding bad marketing saves time, money and wasted effort. S while we’ve all done them, and there’s many more, but try to avoid these 5 marketing sins.

1. Start / Stop Marketing –
Once you’ve started to see those customers piling through the door it’s easy to assume your marketing job is done. It’s not. Effective marketing isn’t about any single campaign or idea – it’s about all your efforts and ideas combining to create ‘marketing momentum’.

Your marketing activities should be at the forefront of your business whenever trade is good. It’s at this point when there’s already a buzz about your business and you can be confident in your approach to new customers and clients. If you stop, the momentum and flow of new business will eventually dry up and restarting it from scratch will costly and time consuming.

2. Advertising as Marketing –
Advertising is not Marketing! Well, it is, but it’s only a single tool in your marketing arsenal. Think image, customer service, your product or service itself, the way your phones are answered, your dealings with the media, networking, your website, how often the bins get emptied.

Everything that your customer or client can come in contact with is a marketing opportunity. Everything.

3. Chasing New Business –
The old adage that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers and clients has never been truer. Increasing competition, greater access to information through the Internet and burgeoning consumer confidence all mean that retaining loyal customers is more important, and difficult, than ever before.

Of course you need new business, but your marketing strategy needs to include ways to ensure loyalty, generate word-of-mouth buzz and increase sales volumes from your existing customer or client base. Never assume your current customers will be there forever. After all, your competitors are chasing after them right now.

4. Forgetting the Front Line -
Your staff are the front line of your marketing efforts. Are they excited? Do they treat each customer with respect? Do they look the part? What about you, do you embody the image you’d like your business to portray?

The most carefully crafted marketing message can be immediately undone by the actual customer/client experience. On the other hand, get it right, and your staff become ‘brand ambassadors’ and ‘buzz generators’ for your business.

5. Eggs All, Basket One
Marketing can, at times, be a bit fickle. What works today might not work tomorrow and what works for your competitors might not work for you. If you commit all your energies and your entire budget to a single marketing activity you’ll be in dire straits if it doesn’t come off.

Try dozens, if not hundreds, of low cost ideas, find the ones that work and then ramp them up. If an idea doesn’t work, move onto the next or find ways to ‘fix it’. You should treat your marketing like a science experiment; test and retest ideas and media to see what works for YOUR business before you commit any serious cash.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Take part on industry and general forums

15 minute tip

We all know - or should know - the power of networking. It enhances your reputation, helps you find business, keeps you in the know, helps you find help and loads more good things too numerous to mention. Face-to-face may be best but when it comes to finding people with similar interests to you (or your perfect customer) there's no quicker way than to join in with some of the thousands of online forums and networking sites.

I started marketing my business this way and get new clients and enquiries from forums nearly every week.

Here are a few simple tips:

1. Find out where your customers hang out. Define your target customer then go look for them.

2. Use a simple signature to drive traffic to your website

3. Use the same username on all the forums you take part in (your business name is good)

4. Avoid any personal attacks or 'slagging' exercises

5. Do contribute useful advice and don't use it to pitch your business unnecessarily. If someone asks for a quote or advice in
your field by all means mention your business BUT blatant self-promotion is actually counter productive.

6. Find an active forum. There's no point in taking part in forums where the last post was 3 months ago.

7. Ask good questions

8. Be professional. Most forums are quite informal so let your personality come through but remember you are marketing your business every time you post

9. Follow-up: get to know who's who on the forum, visit their sites and get in touch 'off forum' if you think you could work together

10. Track the results - as with all things marketing, make sure you track the results of your time spent online. Use Google Analytics or similar to see where website traffic is coming from and make a habit of asking any new business where they first found you. If a particular forum isn't delivering traffic and business it might not be worth pursuing.

Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing


I read a lot of books, mostly small business and marketing topics, and from a purely practical standpoint I'm often left wondering what exactly to do with the information I've just digested. It's not that the quality isn't there, as many of the books I read have something strong and original to say, but rather they are heavy on theory and examples of global businesses but light of practical 'do this today' implementation for small businesses.

Personally, I'm big on practical. Of course, I want ideas but I also want to see them in practice or broken down into actionable points that I, and my clients, can do right away.

So, on reading Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing by Ron McDaniel, I was hoping for simple step-by-step ideas to create more buzz for the business - and funnily enough that's exactly what I got - 57 of them in fact.

The 57 'buzz building' challenges Ron sets down are for the most part simple ideas - some of them you may already be doing and others you most likely are not. What they all have in common is that they can be done right away but not one is likely to transform your business over night; rather by doing a few every now and then you can start to build buzz gradually over time.

(This is an idea that fits in nicely with my belief that marketing isn't an event but an ongoing process that lasts a business lifetime. With that in mind what we need are lots of simple ideas that we can add to over time.)

Having said that, since receiving the book in the post on Thursday, I've tried no fewer than 10 of these ideas and have already seen site visitors increase and received an enquiry from a client I hadn't spoken to in months.

Simply put, if you need some straight-forward common sense ideas to start creating buzz today, start with Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing.

More Reviews and "Buzzoodle Challengers":

Instigator Blog
Matt on Marketing: Take the Buzz Challenge!
Mike Sansone - ConverStations
Adam Jusko's Review
Ron Finklestein
Small Business Trends - Anita Campbell

Friday, February 16, 2007

We love Ling!


After her appearance on the BBC show Dragon's Den, LingsCars.com is even more well known than before!

If you missed it, you can see the unedited version here.

Ling brings something different to what could be a VERY boring market place and while her style will no doubt turn a lot of people off, the very fact that so many people are talking about her speaks to the power of standing out and being different.

How many businesses do you know that would use a full sized nuclear missle truck to promote their website?

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

How to work with a marketing consultant

I recently read a post on the Shotgun Marketing blog. It uses the analogy of a spoon in a glass of water:

"There was a businessman who was having lunch with an older collegue. The businessman was telling his friend how much he was working and what important things he was doing for his company.
When the older friend heard this, he picked up a teaspoon from the table and started stirring a glass of water. He said that the businessman was the teaspoon and the water was the company and water's motion was all the impact that the young businessman was having on the company.
And then he took the spoon out of the glass.
And the water quickly stopped its motion.
The older friend said that's also what would happen when the man left the company."

This got me thinking about past clients I've worked with and that thinking threw out a few ideas:

1. Why not give them a call? - if the glass isn't being stirred any more they may their 'spoon' back for another spin

2. If I was hiring someone in or looking for a consultant (marketing of otherwise) I'd make sure that my organisation was learning as much as possible from them while they were here. I'd want training me and my team to be a fundamental part of the work they would do in order for me to get the most from their fees - and keep the water swirling even after they'd left.

Assuming most clients don't think that may without prompting it is likely as excellent way to differentiate and really go beyond expectations. I'll be making it part of every new proposal.

Ah, Valentine's Day


What a perfect day to give a few customers a call and tell them you love them.

(In the non-creepy way that is - i.e. you love working with them and if you do actually LOVE them it's probably better to keep that to yourself)

Happy Valentine's Day

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Starting a Blog

Some simple tips for starting your own blog:

I've fairly new to the whole blogosphere but here are a few bits and pieces I've picked up that have helped get the word out about this lovely blog.

1. Content is king, post well and post frequently

2. Submit your blog to the various search engines - and blog search engines

3. Make it easy for people to sign up using Feedburner or similar

4. Encourage comments and participate on other people's blogs

5. Add your blog to good blog directories

6. Include links in your forum signatures, website and emails

7. Get in touch with other blog owners and cross-promote

8. Have fun with it and develop your own voice - you can be a bit more 'adventurous' with a blog

9. Check out this good little guide to starting and promoting your own blog - Link

Challenging your own assumptions

I had a good chat with Ron from Buzzoodle yesterday and although I knew a little about how his business had come about, was surprised to learn that his initial concept for Buzzoodle was quite different from what we see today.

Coming from a technology background, when the idea for a structured approach to buzz marketing hit, Ron invisioned a tech solution - providing software for businesses to gauge and track the buzz their advocates created. This certainly got the ball rolling, but Ron was quick to realise that the concept had its limitations and has now gone on to become a prolific speaker, blogger and recent author on the topic. The move from technology to information made sense and is paying dividends.

This got me thinking about how our own pre-conceptions help colour the solutions and methods we envisage.

In a similar vein, the first concepts for FreeForm were to help change the way small businesses market themselves and to do this by providing new marketing tools - a decision coloured by my own background in B2B sales. But like Ron I was willing to take a good look at what the market really wanted - which wasn't what I was selling - so FreeForm has developed much more into a consultancy and training business over the last 6 months.

So how does this help you? Well simple, take a step back and re-examine the assumptions you made when starting your business or latest marketing effort. There's little point in trying to force a solution that isn't a natural fit - listen to your customers, and the ones you don't get, to see if there are other ways to deliver the purpose of your business (i.e. why you're in business in the first place).

Monday, February 12, 2007

Repetition, repetition end er?

I subscribe to the Jay Levinson's (Guerrilla Marketing Association) email newsletter. Today's installment got me thinking about repetition and frequency, i.e. how many times does someone need to see your message before they take action.

I know there are conflicting messages but Jay alluded to 19 or more repititions in one example and I have to say I doubt I would stay with any ad that long before pulling it or changing it. But then I thought about it a bit more and began to focus less about any single advertising message and more about all my marketnig messages combined.

Looking at it that way, 19 times is nothing.

Clients may have seen me dozens if not hundreds of times before they lift the phone or send the email that sends me paying business - on forums, this blog, free newsletters, articles I write, speaking engagments, workshops, direct mail, free reports, Squiddo lens etc...

So to make sure they all tie together and are recognised as the same, we need to present a consistent message across the board and use as many methods as possible to reinforce that message. In and of themselves, any one of the things I mentioned above might not bring in a huge amount of business, but if they serve to reinforce each other then the small time and financial costs are worth it.

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Sunday, February 11, 2007

Lost and Found

15 minute idea:

People love finding things. Remember when you found that extra change in your pockets or the crisp note fluttering on the ground. It's something you didn't expect - and all the sweeter for it.

You can recreate that same excitement with a your own lost and found marketing 'stunt'. Print up 50 small denomination gift certificates for your business and strategically 'lose' then throughout your town. Make sure they are well branded and get noticed - the buzz they create from people talking about their great 'find' is worth 15 minutes of anybody's time.

(NB - On a similar note, try dropping free gift certificates in with customers purchases, mailouts and other communications. If you don't make a fuss about them they'll have a surprise factor that creates goodwill and word-of-mouth buzz.)

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

15 minute tips


In speaking to loads of small business owners one of the most frequent reasons I hear for then not marketing is lack of time. It's understandable really, most small business owners have a lot on their plates at any given moment and finding a few hours a week to market their businesses can seem a bit daunting.

This leads businesses to what I call 'stop-start' marketing - i.e. you invest a bunch of time and money into a marketing idea and then cross your fingers and hop eit brings in the business. A month later when it hasn't, you curse the wasted expense, vow never to spend money on that again and then run off and try something equally expensive and useless.

We all know that repitition is one of the keys to successful marketing so a far better idea is to invest a little time on a regular basis into doing low cost and no cost marketing ideas that gradually build into a marketing whole.

With that in mind, I'll be running a series of posts on ideas you can do in just 15 minutes a day - you can also check out some of these ideas and useful links at the 15 minute marketing lens on Squidoo.

Monday, February 05, 2007

One step beyond


Good service is expected these days. To stand out and get people talking about your business you need to be different. I wouldn't suggest giving terrible service (although people would talk about you) so that means you need to give phenomenal service.

A great example is my recent stay at an Edinburgh hotel (The Knight Residence in Edinburgh).

I expected: Room ready at stated 2pm check in
Phenomenal service: Ready when I arrived early at 10am

I expected: Had my details on file
Phenomenal service: Had my details, my name was on my door, a personal welcome note was left on the table

I expected: Internet access in the room
Phenomenal service: They let me use their office computer to check my emails

The extra cost involved was nil but they turned me from a satisfied guest into a walking, talking marketing tool for their business.

Do you really need to market your business?

I often speak to small business owners who say "we don't need to market our business".

You'd probably assume that my answer would be 'yes you do' - but it isn't.

In fact, my answer to that question is always the same: you already are! Many businesses take a very narrow view as to what constitutes marketing - in most cases they actually mean advertising instead (and many great businesses don't need to advertise). But even taking the traditional 4 P's approach you can see that marketing is much more than what it says in your newspaper ad or what keywords you use in Google.

So what does constitute marketing? In my opinion, marketing is made up of everything that your customers or potential customers (or anyone else for that matter) could come in contact with. Using such a broad definition leads you to question how to get the most from every aspect of your business and start challenging some assumptions.

How does the look of my office affect the number of recommendations I get?
Do my invoices encourage repeat business?
What do my staff say about my business - or not say?

Start looking at marketing in this way and virtually everything becomes an opportunity to increase your appeal and make sure you're putting across the right message.