John Jantsch

Businesses are jumping on twitter right and left and that’s probably a good thing. But, businesses are also jumping on thinking that’s all you need to do. Create a twitter account, create a bunch of followers, and start tweeting out this week’s lunch special. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work that way. In fact, unless you’re a celebrity, you don’t create a twitter following, you earn it.

Even if you have lots of customers or readers don’t be surprised if you find it hard to port them to twitter just because you’ve decided to make the leap. I’m not suggesting any of this as reason not to utilize the potential of twitter, just keep your expectations and strategies in line and view twitter as a long term play that takes effort and commitment to maximize.

In my view there are three ways that people earn followings on twitter

1) A reputation for great content - People want to follow people who might share insights, resources and great content. It’s a bit hard to do this in 140 characters or less, so that great content and reputation needs to exist or be carefully nurtured in order to gain followers by virtue of your ideas. Building great content, and reputation for consistently creating great content is no easy feat and probably why so many people abandon twitter quickly. Now, Guy Kawasaki for example puts out good content, has a reputation for doing so, and garners lots of followers who value to the stories and ideas that he broadcasts. He built a following on that reputation and maintains it. Seth Godin doesn’t use twitter because he doesn’t want to, but he would have 10,000 followers the day he started using it and grow rapidly from there because he has a reputation for great content. Chris Brogan has a huge following because he creates great content on his blog, but he’s a relative newcomer and doesn’t have a string of best selling books, but he has the added catalyst of an incredible level of engagement with his followers - which, leads to the second way. If you’re not Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki or Chris Brogan, then go to work on building your reputation for great content and the followers will come.

2) The bandwidth to give to get - The second way to earn followers on twitter is to give. Carrie Wilkerson, also known as the Barefoot Executive, seems to be on twitter all day long giving support, answering questions, pointing out other people’s content and saying hi to folks she’s met along the way. This level of engagement is incredible and allowed her to earn a large following on twitter. As I mentioned in the earlier point, Chris Brogan combines great content with tons of care and feeding of his followers. Giving advice, answering questions, pointing out great content, retweeting great content, promoting your followers’ events and content is how you gain a reputation as someone worth networking with and following. Again, bandwidth and commitment are keys. read more

The reports of diving revenues and continued economic downturn have many businesses rethinking any visions of growth projections. The hot phrase these days is, “flat is the new up.”

And that may indeed be your most prudent short-term strategy – focus on ways that allow you to hang on and retain the business you currently enjoy rather than flitter about looking for new markets to save the day.

There are a handful of tactical moves that you should consider in this vein if you have not already.

Focus on customer service

Sure, you should always do this, but now’s the time to revisit this entire category and start looking at everything your business does, with regard to a customer, as customer service.

Map out every current and potential contact with prospects and customers and ask yourself how you could turn each one into a marketing opportunity. Now, I don’t mean a sales opportunity so much as I mean an opportunity to enrich the relationship and enhance the experience.

Then, go about putting your energy into building processes that allow you to take full advantage of the touches created by marketing and sales, as well as finance, delivery, support and service functions.
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When you focus on customer retention, customer acquisition will take care of itself.

The cost of acquiring a new customer rises every year for most companies. In an economic climate such as we are experiencing now, acquisition costs can skyrocket due to increased competitive pressure as businesses look for new ways and new markets to keep revenues up.

While many businesses spend a great deal of their marketing budget and focus on generating leads and new customers, the smart money right now is to focus on your existing customers with an eye on retention.

An existing loyal customer base can help most businesses ride out a storm and in some cases be the key to growth for your business while competitors struggle and watch their customers jump ship for lower prices elsewhere.

There are several ways to increase your retention and turned satisfied customers into fans.

Add Value

Tear down your products and services and look for ways to inject them with more value. While many people look to slash prices the real winners hold on to profit by adding value. You may even consider partnering with other firms to find ways to make each other’s offerings better.

Focus on PR

One of the best ways to retain customers is to reinforce the great decision they made to hire you in the first place. Few things do this like media coverage. When an existing customer reads about their service provider in the weekly business paper it further cements the relationship they have with that provider and acts as a subtle referral reminder

Get Success Stories

Involve your customers in your marketing by documenting their success with your products and services in case studies and video interviews. When a customer agrees to give your firm this kind of testimonial they go on record endorsing you and generally become much more loyal in terms of promoting your business to others.

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Blogging tools have evolved significantly due to the tremendous popularity of blogging in general. Because of this evolution blog software has actually become one of the best ways for small businesses to easily build feature rich, simple to edit, search engine friendly web sites.

I would urge anyone without a web site or with a boring static brochure site to take a good hard look at free piece of software called WordPress. The current version of the software can be downloaded from WordPress.org (They have a hosted blog version at WordPress.com but you want the download from the .org site.)

You can use this software to create your entire website whether you have or want a blog or not. (But, of course you need a blog too.) One of the best functions of this set-up is that anyone in your organization with the proper login permission can update and edit the site including adding pages, text and images without any knowledge of HTML or web design software such as Dreamweaver.

On of the core elements of WordPress is something called a theme. This is essentially the design template that controls the look and feel of all of the pages throughout the site. There are lots of places you can get pre-designed templates for blogs, but recently designers have started creating themes for the type of web site implementation I’m talking about in this article. Using these themes your web site looks like, well, a web site, instead of a blog.

Setting up WordPress

Since WordPress is software you install and configure on the server of a host you still need to have a domain name and hosting. Your host needs to support PHP and mySql databases. Now, don’t worry, most do. In fact, a host that I’ve used frequently is Lunar Pages and they not only support these, they can add WordPress to your site with the click of a button.

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Here’s something your customers won’t ever tell you, but you better understand - Your employees are probably treating your customers about the same way you are treating your employees. Soak that in a minute and process the impact that might have on your organization’s ability to generate referrals.

Organizations that easily generate a high number of referrals hire for referral factors and treat their people as the prime target customer. It makes sense of course, happy employees are much more likely to represent the brand in a positive manner.

In all but the most technical positions, much of what employees do on a day to day basis can be taught. It’s much harder, however, to teach someone to be trustworthy, to give or to serve, yet, as stated above, these are key traits of organizations that generate referrals. A habit of referral for any organization that has more than two or three employees then is entrusted to the actions of the entire staff.

Mike McDerment, founder of FreshBooks, an online time tracking and invoicing service located in Toronto Canada shared these thoughts on how he addresses the customer, employee relationship, “First, we try to find people for fit, shared values and a passion for excellence. That doesn’t mean we have some preconceived idea of what they look like. It’s more that they match our brand in some way. We’re not in the billing business, we’re in the service business and we like to have fun. It really makes things easy if we surround our customers with employees that like to serve and like to have fun.”

The final element of the employee as customer habit lies in the word empowerment. While the word empowerment shows up in almost every book ever written about management, it’s a term that is easy to say but not so easy to put into action.

In the 1999 book, First, Break All The Rules: What The World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman published findings from research conducted by the Gallup Organization involving 80,000 managers across different industries.

The primary thesis of the work was that if a company could not satisfy an employee’s basic needs first, it could never expect the employee to give stellar performance.

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You want to sell what you’ve got to sell, but what if that’s no longer what the market wants to buy. The Sony Walkman (for those of you under 30) was once the thing. Rich kids and cool kids had them and then everyone had them. But, that was yesterday, now it’s an iPod world.

So, the question is, are you still trying to peddle you industry’s version of the Walkman or are you willing to take a look at every aspect of your business, your products, your services, and your processes in an effort to give the market what it demands.

When times are good, people will spend their money on things they don’t really need, but right now, consumers are businesses are pretty darn focused on getting the most bang for every penny spent. Now is the time to make sure that your products align with that kind of thinking.

Let me give you an example of Walkman vs. iPod business models.

Traditional medical practice

Walkman - you make an appointment through your insurance company, mountain of paperwork, doctor makes you wait 30 minutes past appointment time, doctor pretends to listen, discounts treatment options you’ve found on Internet as a hoax, prescribes several medications to treat symptoms without any discussion about prevention diet or exercise.

Neighborhood clinic

iPod - same day appointment, paperwork online, massage therapy and green tea while you wait, appointment on time, discussion about overall health, encouraged to explore combination of traditional medicine and alternative therapies.

So, you’re not in the medical business - whatever industry you are in, I assure you there are standard practices that no longer mirror what the ideal customer is looking for - find out what they tolerate and blow it up.

No matter what you make, fix, ship or sell in this day and age, what you really have to offer to differentiate is the customer experience. You are in the customer exciting business and that comes about only when you can put away everything that you assume about your business and products and focus 100% of your strategic attention on understanding just exactly what the market wants today.

One of the most powerful, yet underutilized tools, in marketing is tracking. By that I mean some form of measuring the success and failure of marketing initiatives. For most this practice might begin and end at measuring the response rate of a direct mail piece. What I am talking about though is a systematic approach to diagnosing and tracking what I call the Key Success Indicators in your business.

Starts with a vision

Before we can begin any discussion about measuring success indicators we have to talk a bit about vision. See, you can set targets and goals without an ultimate or at least short term destination in mind. If you are going to start tracking what matters you have to, well, know what matters. By that I mean you need to have some picture of where you want your business to go in the next year, three years, five years. You must be able to see, quite clearly, what it’s like to run your business in the future. Before you can set action steps and tactics, you must have the vision and the strategy that will make it real nailed.

Where are you now?

In order to set some key success indicators it can be helpful to attempt some measurement of where you are now.

At the very least we need to try to see where you are in the things that may be found hidden inside your accounting software so that we can use them as benchmarks for growth. Things such as revenue, profit, number of clients and number of transactions are a good place to start.

What can you know?

The next step is to add (if you are not tracking these already) things that we can know for sure such as number of leads, percent of leads converted to clients, average revenue per client, number of transactions per client, cost to acquire a new client. Next add a success layer for the number of referrals, number of PR mentions, number of speaking engagements, number of client testimonials, number of compliments.

These hard data items are essential when it comes to setting goals and even setting budgets.

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