Marketing

“What matters is the humility that comes from writing it. What matters is the meta-cognition of thinking about what you’re going to say.” These were some of the inspiring words from author and top business blogger Seth Godin captured at the 2008 Inc.5000 conference for OPEN Forum’s Inside the Entrepreneurial Mind series. In the latest installment, New Perspectives on Business, Godin goes head to head with business expert Tom Peters, who said, “No single thing in the last 15 years professionally has been more important to my life than blogging.”

But they weren’t always so aligned when it came to the most important issues affecting business owners today. When asked which political party is better for small business, Godin stood firm in his belief that SBO’s should lead by example, “we need to act in a way we want the government to act, and vice versa.” Peters, on the other hand, drilled down to what he as a business owner is personally concerned with, “I kind of like it when the revenue exceeds the cost by a significant number” – a sentiment which clearly resonated with many of the SBO’s in the room who broke out in unbridled laughter.

For more insights from these experts: from the economic crisis to the importance of decency in business and from the You Tube phenomenon to thoughts on Generation X, visit New Perspectives on Business. read more

The very best thing you can do to GROW your business today is to disregard what you read, see and hear and think what you want to think.

When the talking heads want you to think that you have NO control over the economy or the future success of your business; thinking what you want to think is the most empowering thing you can do for the success of your business.

What if Galileo decided to believe that the Sun revolved around the Earth? What if the Wright Brothers accepted that people didn’t fly? What if Columbus believed that the Earth was flat? What if Bill Gates or Steve Jobs believed computers weren’t for people, just companies. All of these people thought what THEY wanted to think. They held on to what they believed was true and their life was a pursuit of bringing that truth to life so that other people could see it too.

Re-Think Your Marketing Mission

Take just one day and don’t listen to the news or read the paper. Use this time to truly re-think your industry, your customers’ needs and the role of your business in fulfilling those needs. Your objective here is to look at your customers and their needs WITHOUT the economy muddying the real issues that they are having. What’s happening in the economy is happening on paper. What’s happening in your business is real dollars and cents. So don’t let paper value interfere with real on-going value that you provide.

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Effective marketing is effective marketing in good times and bad. But it’s funny how many more people seem to focus on it when the economic weather turns a little chilly.

There are certain core strategies that, if focused on continually, can make your business almost impervious to changes in the economy.

My favorite is building what I call your strategic network. Essentially this is a group of partners that you trust to serve your ideal customers and that you know trust you likewise. These partners should of course also possess lots of your ideal customer in their database.

If you work diligently to formally build, work, promote, refer and grow your network, you will soon find that the benefits are many.

1. You can become a trusted adviser to your customers by confidently recommending products and services that help them get what they want in all areas of business and life.
2. You can easily and logically develop joint marketing initiatives with one or more partners and share the costs of promotion while borrowing trust built by each partner. This can include brochures, sales calls and workshops hosted jointly
3. You can assemble a project team capable of outmaneuvering the largest competitor.
4. You can create a rock solid local search strategy that involves blog content from each partner in an area of specialty. Great content with a local focus is tough to beat from an SEO standpoint.
5. You can adopt a not-for-profit organization and hold community networking events at your charity partner’s place of business creating great exposure for them.

Once you have your key network partners in place the only thing that can hold you back is the collective imagination of your partners. read more

An economic climate like we are experiencing at the moment often comes with the competitive pressure to lower prices. I’m not really sure that the downturn so famously chronicled on page one has or ever will really impact the typical small business in the way that it once did, but perception can create the pressure to react to the headlines.

For most small business owners, the first place to look when facing tougher competitive challenges is value instead of price. In other words, look at your products and services and ask yourself how you can add value to the offerings before you simply cut the price to generate business. The problem with discounts is they become permanent and have the net effect of devaluing what you do. By looking for ways to add value, you will likely stumble upon enhancements that become true points of differentiation and drive the real and perceived value of what you offer up - making your business both unique and more profitable.

I saw a brilliant example of this on a recent trip to New York. Several gas stations were lined up on a busy street chipping away at each other by lowing their price, sometimes multiple times throughout the day. One of the stations decided to be low cost AND “we pump” your gas for you. Guess who got all the business? read more

One thing we as entrepreneurs and small business people recognize is that we have a bit of an identity problem – meaning we don’t have one. At least that’s what it feels like sometimes as not enough people know who we are and what we do, which means they can’t turn to us when they need products and services we could provide them. And in the current economic conditions it is critical to find ways to make it as easy as possible for those looking for the help we can provide to find us.

With that in mind, it’s important for us to understand a new reality. We may think we’re in one business, but now we’re really in two. Yes we’re in financial services, health care, sanitation and other traditional businesses. But in today’s Web-driven world, not only are we running these kinds of businesses, but we’re also running a media firm of sorts. That’s because your customers and prospects are turning to the Web to find help. In fact the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media study recently found Sixty percent of Americans use social media, and 85% those users believe a company should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media.

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Marketing your book online is both rewarding and challenging. It’s rewarding because much of what you can do online is either free or low cost. Knowing what to do and in what order is the challenging part.

There is a method to marketing your book online that you’ll need to follow if you want to leverage your efforts and steadily increase sales. If your marketing efforts are haphazard, you’ll put a lot of effort into marketing your book and become frustrated with the results. If you do them in the right sequence, though, your marketing efforts will yield exponential, long-term results.

Whether you have published your book through a traditional publishing house or a print-on-demand publisher, you must take a highly active role in promoting and marketing your book.

Follow these ten steps to build interest and drive sales. Implement them in the order given to maximize your online marketing efforts.  read more

(image credit Marin IJ)
What do people think of when they are considering Corbet’s Hardware, a local business near my home? For that matter, what do they think of Ambrosia restaurant? Or Alex’s Dry Cleaning? What about Embarcadero Physical Therapy, or Peter Levi Plumbing?

Well, if you’ve read my previous writings on the subject, when someone wants to know about a local business, the first thing they’ll do is put those names into Google and see what happens.

Besides the fact that I’ve done business with each of these establishments, (and written about a few in this series), it used to be the only thing that connected these companies together (besides geography) was the Yellow Pages. Now, all that’s changed with search, and in particular, local search.

And when you drill down into it, what’s really a game changer is that the best local search tools all have become platforms for conversation - in this case, conversation about the products, services, and intangibles of each small business.

So let’s use Corbet’s as an example, shall we, and see what we learn?

Corbet’s Hardware is my neighborhood hardware store, it’s something of a local legend. Let’s see what happens when I put it into Google (I omitted the apostrophe, as most folks do).

Interesting. First up is a link from “zinsser.com”, which appears to be some kind of a shellac company (no, really, a company that makes shellac). Corbet’s probably carries their products - the Zinsser site lists its distributors - but man, what on earth is that doing being first? Clearly, Corbet’s has not exactly joined the conversation economy quite yet.

Put another way, the very first link for Corbet’s is not Corbet’s own website (the store does not seem to have one), it’s some random supplier of Corbet’s. This is not a good thing.

Second up is a very nice profile of Corbet’s in the local paper. Third is another link from the paper about the store moving. A credit to the store, for sure. But it’s not really very conversational (for more on why I think “conversational” is so important, read this).

Fourth is a link from “ziphip.com”, which looks like some kind of listings directory (or more cynically, an Adsense honeypot). Nothing really useful for a potential customer of Corbet’s - nothing conversational or particularly trustworthy.

Fifth is a link from Yahoo Local about the store. Now we are getting somewhere. When you look at it, you find three reviews of the store, all of them quite positive (including one from someone named John Battelle from back in 2005. Who is that guy?). Regardless of my own bias, here’s a conversation about the store folks are likely to trust. Three reviews, all glowing.

Sixth is an entry from Topix, a local news aggregator owned by a consortium of large newspaper companies. In short, the Topix entry declares that local residents are in support of the store in some kind of controversy surrounding a move to a new location. That’s good!

Seventh, and just before the all-important “above the fold” (the results you see before you have to scroll down), is an entry from Yelp, one of the leading local review sites on the web. There’s only one review, but it’s a good one.

I’ll stop now and offer a few thoughts. First, the fact is (and I speak from experience), Corbet’s is a well-loved local institution, but if your first view of the place is through search, you have to work way too hard to find that out. Second, it’s clear that no one at Corbet’s has given the web a second thought, because Corbet’s doesn’t have a website, and clearly no one has joined the nascent conversation that has sprung up around the store (in the first seven links, there are four unsolicited and positive reviews. It’d be great if someone from Corbet’s joined the party and said “thanks for caring!”). And third, there’s a tremendous opportunity to be had by joining that conversation, in the process branding Corbet’s as quite possibly one of the most beloved local businesses in all of Marin.

Turns out, Corbet’s could really use that love. Remember that sixth link, the one about “some kind of controversy surrounding a move to a new location.” Turns out, Corbet’s landlord is raising the rent, and the store is trying to move into a new building nearby. But the city planning commission is making it hard for the company to get the zoning it needs to make the move. Corbet’s has mounted a pretty good grassroots campaign through snail mail and petitions in the store, but to really win, it needs to harness the power of the web.

So far, it’s failing miserably.

But imagine, if you would, that Corbet’s had a blog, and used that blog to talk about its business. The folks at Corbet’s could post about weekly specials, tips on home improvement, best approaches to pest control, and all the stuff that brings customers into the store. Oh, and by the way, it could leverage all its built in good will to drive its customers toward the Larkspur City Council, who, in the end, will determine whether or not Corbet’s will continue as a business - if Corbet’s doesn’t get that zoning change, it can’t afford to stay open. Ouch!

Given how sparse and poorly connected the first few links for “Corbets hardware” currently are, it’s clear that such a blog would come in first, and possibly second, third, and fourth, in any Google search. Add a Twitter account, and you’re nearly guaranteed to be a major force in any web-based conversation around your business. (In fact, I’d be willing to bet that within a few weeks, this blog post may well rank in the top ten for a search about Corbet’s…).

In short, by joining the conversation, Corbet’s would get a chance to shape it. And by shaping it, it just might ensure its future. Which leads me to ask: Has your business joined the conversation? You might consider doing so, before it’s too late.

Since the early years of the Internet consumers have hunted for bargains at eBay. The online marketplace was an exciting place to shop and consumers enjoyed bidding on items and winning auctions. Millions of small businesses became eBay sellers and a global, vibrant ecommerce community emerged benefiting almost everyone involved.

But for many consumers auctions have become time-consuming and frustrating. Instead of wading through an uncertain auction process, online buyers are choosing to use search and shopping tools to quickly and conveniently find and buy fixed priced products. This shift has resulted in traffic declines at eBay while competitors such as Amazon, Wal-Mart and Craigslist enjoy increasing numbers of online shoppers.

eBay has identified this trend and has announced a series changes to improve their “Buy it Now” fixed price service. They are also redesigning their site and releasing new search tools in hopes of creating a better buying experience for consumers.

To better understand how small sellers are being impacted by the shift from auctions to fixed price sales, we recently interviewed a number of web merchants about their web presence and views on online auctions. The key results are: read more