A call to action

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A call to action (CTA) is potentially the most critical element of any marketing you do.  It’s the ‘mojo’ of your marketing efforts – it’s the guts of your message– it’s the bit where you tell people what you want them to do. And every marketing piece you produce is effectively asking people to do something, whether it’s remembering your brand, sign up, buy a product, become a fan…

Having a clear and simple CTA will increase the response. There is nothing more frustrating for your customer than not being able to find a phone number to respond to, the link button to click on or trying to remember a web address. Or – worst of all, reading a long piece of text and then feeling slightly bewildered as to what the point was.  Responding to you and talking to your business should be stupidly simply for people to do.

The best example of offering clear and direct call to action is direct response TV.   Those TV infomercials/advertisements that promote products and tell you clearly, simply and with repetition how to purchase their product. (Click here to view if you’ve never had the viewing pleasure) There is no single moment where the viewer is unclear on how to purchase the product.

And while this approach to advertising may not sit with your brand style, approach, product, business etc – you can appropriate the clarity in which these advertisements deliver their marketing messages and their CTA.

Top tips for your Call to Action:

  • Don’t make your response mechanism laborious (I.e. type this address into your browser, phone this number and wait 5 mins for an operator etc)
  • Be very clear on what you want people to do … read something? call you?  Go to your website? Purchase?
  • For online purchasing – study the giants. Amazon are the most successful online retailer,  their site is packed full of sign posts telling people what to do ‘look inside’ ‘ For you to Consider’ ‘add to basket’ – they signpost the actions they want customers to take
  • Become a critic – for every piece of marketing you see; ask yourself what the marketer wants you to do.  And then ask – have they made it easy to do it?

Even highly experienced marketers have sometimes taken their eye off the ball. They fall ‘in love’ with the concept and message that they neglect the CTA.  It can be an expensive mistake.  For small businesses, where you need to make every last penny/cent count – the single most important thing you can do that will make your advertising a success it delivering a clear and simple Call to Action.

DRTV examples your perusal.

And what Wiki has to say about Direct response marketing

 

Social Media for Small Businesses – Part 3. Love the numbers.

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Measurement. You’re probably already doing it without realising. If you’re watching the ‘likes’ on your posts and pages.  If you’re counting your followers and checking your blog stats, then yes, you’re doing it. But make sure that you’re getting insight from your efforts. Watch the metrics carefully and ensure you’re learning as much as you can so you can be smarter and more efficient in your social media efforts.

Planning and measurement go hand-in-hand. There is no point in creating a plan without putting in place a means to measure it. Otherwise, how do you know when to congratulate yourself?

To understand the value of metrics, consider this; what if posting an update of a new product launch (which has no cost to you) delivers you more fans and more leads than posting a promotion about a product discount? (and therefore reducing your profit margin to offer the promotion).

Social media is about learning what content people value and what will win their favour.  The only way you’ll learn what works best and where is by watching the numbers carefully and learning about how people respond to your content.

Two key metrics:

Before you launch any new social media activity; whether it’s a simple campaign launch, launching your business on social media, or launch on a new social media platform; make sure you record your baseline measurement and reference it as your Before Social Media (BSM) number. Then as your activity rolls out – watch the figures increase against this benchmark.

The two key metrics for small businesses on social media:  (And we’re only suggesting 2, as it’s very easy to overload on metrics)

  1. ROI – How much money are you making from your efforts? How many leads are driven from your Social media activities? The simplest way to check this, without fancy tracking analytics etc, is to always ask your customers how they heard about you. If this isn’t feasible for you then another effective way to track this when running a promotion is to ask them to quote a promotion number or reference and advertisement when they contact you.  Make the reference quote easy to remember (i.e. don’t make it hard for your customers!)
  2. Engagement – Not everyone that follows your brand will turn into leads.  However, engaged followers can be worth their weight in gold to bring you leads, grow awareness, and engage others.  Watch how many ‘likes’ you have, who is sharing your content, how often it’s been viewed and how long people view it for.  If you have followers who are especially prolific in sharing content and have a reasonable fan base themselves, then nurture these people. Give them some exclusive access, trails, samples etc. Love the people who love your business.

As measurement geeks we get a bit giddy when we see marketing statistics– but not all people feel this way (sigh!) and if this is the case, we implore you to take a passing interest at least once a week.  Happy measuring and learn to love the numbers!

Social Media for businesses – part 2

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But what if they say something bad?

This is one of the biggest concerns that businesses of any size have about being on social media. There is a fear that it could all go horribly wrong and spiral out of control. There are many horror stories to point to (even in a previous post called screw ups I’ve mentioned some) and they tell tales of how businesses totally misjudged the media and its audience.

But back to the pertinent question..

What if they (the audience) say something bad?

Well yes, what if…

The best way to meet this concern is to be prepared. Unfortunately, there are many people who are more comfortable being cynical, critical and trollish online (to others) than to your face. And there is every chance you will meet these people online when you start promoting your business.

But to be totally confident about establishing your online presence in social media you need to prepare yourself with what I call ‘a reputation toolkit’.

Your reputation toolkit:

  • First of all, ask yourself – what’s the worst they could (legitimately) say? Identify what negative things could be said about your products/services. Consider what could go wrong (eg. late delivery, faulty products, customer expectations not met). These are problems that you may have come across and dealt with in the day-to-day running of your business. How do you address these issues? Analysing this and drawing up a plan of how you would respond to online criticism means that are prepared to respond quickly and accurately. Also how would you appease the customers? Consider you actions in advance so you’ve already got an approach should you find yourself the subject of criticism. And yes – you do need to respond to criticism. This is your right of reply and people want to see you respond.
  • Embrace social media as a fast and cost efficient way to deal with customer feedback or questions. Consider what steps you could take to help the customer via online media. The first step is always communication – so when a customer has a gripe, what they (and their audience) could be saying is  ‘I want some help, I’m frustrated, annoyed, I want this solved.
  • And what happens if they’ll complaining about something you weren’t aware of?  This is your chance to learn. And appreciate the chance to help them and rectify things.

And for the hard-to-please?

A fact of online life. But most people recognise when someone is being unreasonable and in the instance where you’ve done everything possible to assist a disgruntled customer, people will recognise this (and recognise that the troll is being unreasonable).

People are looking for honesty, authenticity and openness from businesses on social media. They will also take the chance to talk to you about your businesses offerings if they need to.

So, be prepared and listen to what people are saying to you.

 

 

Social media for small businesses – part 1

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If you’re running a small business, you probably haven’t been living in a cave. And you’ve probably noticed the ‘social media explosion’ – and you’re probably wondering;

A : If you should be doing it too, or, B: if you’re doing it, are you doing it right?

The next few blogs are a basic tour of social media for small business. They’ll give you an idea about how to approach this new media and how to assess whats right or wrong for your business.

Lets start with a definition.

Social media is not Facebook. Social media is any online space where you can interact with your customers. (See that?- It’s all about your customers…again!)

This includes chat rooms, forums, blogs, reviews, social networks such as Facebook, Linked in, media sites such as utube, flicker, communications such as skype, instant messaging, social commerce such as groupon etc etc…anything where people can interact.

When you asses whether or not you want to do social media – or if you’re doing it right, you need to asses if you’re willing to interact with customers online. And if you’re willing to make this ongoing commitment.

But beware, if you choose not to interact with your customers online, it won’t stop them interacting about your business. And this is where the reality of social media causes headaches for businesses.

If you’re not online, providing the information that you customers are asking for – you run a reputation risk. It’s easy for a customer to blog or write a review about a negative experience with your business. More often than not you are able to rectify this negative experience with some good customer service, but if you’re not online to assist the customer – then the negative experience remains a ‘poster’ for your business and it hasn’t been balanced by your right of reply.

Your judgement of where and how you should be online needs to be guided by what your customers doing.

I’ll talk more about reputation risk in my next blog – but for now, we’ll look at where you should be on social media.

There are thousands of Social Media sites. So where should you be?

Well – where are your customers and where will they talk about you? For example, Facebook is a social network where people link with their known acquaintances and chat about their non-professional life (generally speaking of course!).

They’re less likely to be talking about their bank, tax accountant or insurance policy – than they are talking about their morning of golf, holiday plans, or night out. And you can’t make them talk about your tax accountancy service – because they are simply not in the mood (or frame of mind) when they are in that online space. Whereas they might be in the mood when they log into Linked in – a network for professionals. A place where they go to think about professional services in terms of what they offer and what others offer.

So match your business to where people regard it in their life. Is your business selling a personal or business product/service? Ask your customers what they look at online and listen closely to what they say. They may surprise you and give you some great ideas!

 

Making people laugh (or cry).

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So you’ve got a limited budget for advertising. Any money you do spend, really needs to deliver you results for you to justify it. But how do you compete with these businesses with big advertising budgets who have the financial power to dominate the advertising landscape?

Heres how: by making your messages memorable…

The good news is, that when it comes to good advertising, the landscape can be quite even.  A very effective (and cheap) way of achieving memorable advertising is by creating a positive emotion to associate with the message.

Emotions, smileys

Emotion

This approach corresponds to how our brain works. The brain continuously receives lots of information (experiences) from all of our senses simultaneously.

We see / hear / touch / smell and taste things and send those signals to the brain for processing. The brain processing goes through the process of essentially either storing or discarding information.

However, before our brain stores or discards sensatory input, another important step has already happened: it applies a massive filter on all those incoming sensatory signals to prevent us from an overload. It simply cannot processes all sensatory input we’re exposed to everyday.

So the challenge is; how do you get your advert past ‘filtering process’?

The human brain is more likely to store and remember experiences if there is an emotion attached to it.  (Repeating a message over and over again is an alternative way of doing this, but is more risky and usually cost a lot more!). Obviously, most businesses are aiming for a positive emotion to be associated with their product or service. That’s why you see puppies in toilet paper advertisement. Most people would feel fairly ambivalent about the product – but it’s the association to the puppy that gives them positive feelings.

A negative emotion can also effectively influence our target audience. However, using a negative emotion usually requires more explanation within the advertisement, to help people understand why they’re feeling negative and what the key message is (i.e. think of anti drink-driving or some insurance adverts). It requires more contextual information to ensure that the emotion is a result of not listening to the key message – rather than simply associating the negative feeling to the product.

Making an advertisement is similar to reading a story to a child. Children love hearing certain stories and can sometimes really emotionally connect with them. They want to read it over and over again. It doesn’t matter if they already know the outcome or have just heard it; they like to read it again because they love it. The fact that the child has associated an emotion towards the story means that he / she will remember the story (the brain will not discard it).

This is a very powerful effect: most of us still remember our favourite childhood stories and will probably will continue to treasure them for the rest of our lives!

This approach applies to all different forms of advertising across many different channels. You can create positive associations in the images you choose or the copy you write.

So the question is – What adverts do you remember and why?

We’ve done some ‘informal’ research (amongst ourselves) and come up with the following TV adverts (we’ve chosen tv as this is traditionally where advertisers have tried to achieve an emotional response).

Examples of advertisement creating a positive emotion:

Examples of advertisement creating a different emotion (irritation – due to very high repetition of the key messages)

Bonus advertisement which we think is really cool. It uses a storytelling narrative to intrigue you and lead you to its core message..

Managing your network with technology.

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We all know how important it is to build and maintain our network of business contacts. So we attend all sorts of business meetings, conference and trade-shows in order meet with prospective clients and exchange a lot of business cards.

So then what? What do you do with these business cards? Do we put them in a traditional filing system, do we transcribe the information and store it in digital address books, or even better do we put in CRM tool? (Read a previous post about Salesforce.com here.)

I guess I am not alone in saying that a lot of the business cards used to end up on the pile of “task to do”. But we all know about the awesome social networking tools available – so lets use them smarter and more efficiently.

LinkedIn & CardMunch

LinkedIn CardMunch

LinkedIn CardMunch

The obvious starting point is the LinkedIn network. By now, all small business owners who are serious about their business should have an account. If not, just do it: the basic version is free and doesn’t cost much time to set-up. The next step is to download the LinkedIn app for your smart phone or tablet. And for Apple owners, there’s an additional app from LinkedIn you should download: It’s called CardMunch and you can find more info about it here.

CardMunch is a tool that allows you to take a photo of a business card and it will analyse the information and come back with a digitised version of the business card.

CardMunch is owned by LinkedIn and this allows a very powerful benefit: it will offer you to connect via LinkedIn with the person whose business card you just scanned. This process can take time, since it is down manually (!). But the quality is great and it saves us time. Which is what technology should be helping us to do!

Xobni

Xobni sidebar

Xobni sidebar

Lets have a look at Xobni (it is the word “inbox” spelled backwards). It claims to make your inbox smarter and is available for Outlook, Gmail and the usual smart phone platforms: Apple, Android and Black Berry. The smart phone app is called SmartR contacts.

Xobni analyses your emails that have been sent and received by scanning all people on the email distribution list and by going through email signatures. As such it builds an impressive networks of your connections, all stored in the Xobni Cloud.

The applications (on either your Outlook / Gmail or on the smart phone) provide you powerful suggestions when you try to email one of those connections. It also allows you to look up the contact numbers you have for those connects.

The best way of experiencing how powerful this is and how this can help your business is to give it a go. The product comes in a basic free installation with several more powerful options in the pro-version. A specific version for business and teams is also available.

Plaxo

This post would not be complete without discussing Plaxo. Plaxo is probably the longest around. It aims to build and maintain our network of business contacts. Founded by Sean Parker (The famous internet entrepreneur most know for founding Napster and being the founding president of Facebook) in November 2002. It is more or less comparable in functionality to Xobni. I have personally started on the Plaxo platform in 2003 and then moved to LinkedIn and Xobni, for no particle reason other than that one cannot use all services in parallel (short of time again). I would highly recommend you all to have a look at the products and decide which one you prefer and then start using it to manage our business network in a more efficient way.

Let me know if it works as well for you as it works for me.

More info and the products can be found at the links below.

http://www.linkedin.com http://www.cardmunch.com http://www.xobni.com http://www.plaxo.com

 

Gain a competitive edge with new technology

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Running a small business in tough times is challenging. Pressure comes from all directions; – competition increases from your usual competitors and even some of the bigger competitors start looking to entice your customers.

The day-to-day running usually requires all of our time and attention to simply stay in business. And we don’t seem to have any time  to evaluate and think about if we’re running things efficiently. So sometimes it’s easier to keep on doing things in the traditional way, with no thought spend on how we could improve it by using the plethora of new technologies available to us.

How can technology make you more competitive? By giving you speed.

The one major advantage that a small businesses can have over bigger companies is speed. The speed to change or adapt in response to market demand. Small companies can usually move faster in making a decision and executing them immediately. And if we move faster than our competitor, we can address an opportunity earlier and gain the ‘first mover’ advantage.

So let’s pause for a few minutes and think about how a few trivial tasks in our business are run today and how you could make some changes to keep ahead of the game.

Document storage and back-up of data. Boring but very important!

  • Do you still store all data on one computer and sometimes use an external hard disk to back data up?
  • How often do you forget to make a back-up, with potential big consequences?
  • Or how often couldn’t you find a file in front of a customer, because it was stored on our desktop computer / server in our offices and not on the laptop we brought to our customer?.

Why not store our documents ‘in the cloud’ using one of the many solutions available. Cloud storage will make sure we always have a safe copy of our documents. We can then access these documents from any computer, tablet or smart phone, in any place in the world! Have a look the range of providers…

They all seem to provide roughly 5 GB for free and attractive pricing if we need more storage.

Also consider cloud computing. Google documents allows you to store your documents and edit them in the cloud. You could decide to run your business without the traditional Microsoft Office products at all. However the consideration is that you need to be online to edit the data in cloud computing.

Maintenance of client information / contact database.

Many small businesses use one of the Microsoft products like Excel / Access / Word / Exchange for recording customer details and the contact moments. But you what would happen if you lost your customer data? Even for a few days…

Online CRM solutions offer viable and secure options for small business too. And, as mentioned in this blog about your data, your customer details are a critical asset to your business. Salesforce.com for example is a supplier who provides a service that allows you to;

  • Create, store and access your customer profiles and account history.
  • Track all opportunity-related data including milestones, decision-makers, customer communications, and any other information unique to your company’s sales process.
  • Manage your marketing spend and performance.
  • You information can be accessed anywhere through an Internet-enabled mobile device or a connected computer

Having a system that categorises, records and profiles you data is a worthwhile investment for any business and will help you respond to your customers quickly and help you to offer a first class service.

And it the difference of how you serve you customers that will keep them coming back to you during tough times.

 

 

Customer insights create clever marketing.

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There was a Facebook  insight rattling around a few years ago to say that woman, aged 55+, were their biggest growing segment.  This was in 2009 before social network had truly exploded.  I also read this week that they are a growing segment in gaming and developers are scrambling to cater to their tastes.  This group enjoys games that you can dip in and out of throughout the day. Not too intense and easy to play. More on this by Naomi Alderman from the Guardian.

This week, a couple of things reminded me of that insight.

Firstly; On Facebook I’ve had numerous invitations and activity updates by woman (in this segment) asking me to join them in online gaming. (Farmville etc).  I can’t help but notice the growth in this trend.

And secondly, weight watchers UK have refreshed their brand and have rolled out a great new campaign. Called Do it our way ‘play’;  they’re tapping into a number of insights about their key audience (who I’m assuming are predominantly woman 30+)

They’ve tapped into the ‘play’ insight and utilised it to refresh their brand, their product and they’ve tried to address some of the ‘barriers’ to losing weight (I.e. hard, boring, repetitive, slow to reap benefit).

They’ve made it easy, fun and by ‘winning’ points they’ve created immediate reward. And this concept has been succinctly expressed in their TV advert. Clever stuff – but again, the ideas have been formed and developed by simply listening to their customers.  And this tool is available to every business big or small.

Perhaps out of context of this new world of social networking, a concept of ‘making it fun’ wouldn’t have worked.  But in today connected world – It works beautifully.  It’s current, clever and relevant.

Commercial was developed by Saatchi and Saatchi - http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/news/1110452/

The song by Alesha Dixon is catchy too!

Building blocks.

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The theme of this blog is about providing tools to do your own marketing.  I believe everybody is capable of marketing their own business.  However without putting solid foundations in place, your efforts could be in vain.  Below are 3 building blocks that can help you generate relevant and effective marketing.

A database.

Who are your customers? How often do they see you? What do they want?  This is an absolute must for any businesses owner trying to find new customers or develop the relationship with their existing ones.  Without a maintained database you’re missing one of the most critical foundations for any future promotion activity.  You’ve all heard the wisdom nugget ‘It costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain and existing one’. Well, while true – this means nothing without a database.

Listening.

Listen to what’s happening around you. Listen to what’s going on in your industry, what happening in your business environment and what are your customers saying. What are they asking from you? Sponge information everyday to keep yourself up to date with the industry you’re working in. You’re operating in a market place – what are people talking about around you? This knowledge helps you serve your customers and give them what they want.

Objectives.

What do you want to achieve? Setting clear objectives for each activity will help you keep your marketing on the right course. Without objectives it’s not always clear when your hard work is paying off. Of course, you’ll know if you start getting more customers /or start making more money; but you need to pinpoint how you did it and if you can do it again.

Mary Portas is so right!

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The sage words of Mary Portas were running through my mind in an unpleasant retail experience on Tuesday.

Mary Portas is a retail consultant who has achieved her fame through TV reality shows. She marches into struggling retail businesses, tells them how ‘it is’ and helps them to ‘shape up’.

Rather than being just-another-guru, she delivers clever insight and very useful advice.  And like any other self-respecting British celebrity she’s turned herself into a brand. Producing bras, shoes etc.

On Tuesday I visited a large household furnishings retailer that sells items at very cheap prices. I decided to treat my son to afternoon tea at the in-store cafe. It looked fine, clean, tidy and a nice space to enjoy a cuppa.

I was third in line waiting to pay for my cold drink. There were two people in front of me, ordering hot drinks. The lady serving was obviously new to her job and was genuinely struggling with the till and the coffee machine. She was working quite slowly, ensuring she got things right. That doesn’t bother me. It never bothers me that someone needs to take their time because they’re learning etc. Never. I’m happy to wait and offer an encouraging smile. As were the two people behind me in the queue.

What annoyed us all was the other staff member behind the counter, standing with her back to us, talking about her weekend and polishing the syrup bottles. And where I say ‘polishing’ – they were polished with the utmost care, attention and scrutiny. Not a drop of sticky syrup was left on their exterior. I had ample opportunity to watch her while I waited to pay for my cold drink. She also told her colleague that she didn’t have any plans for the weekend, but hoped to see a movie….etc.

Why it was more important to polish the bottles than turn around, smile at the waiting customers and assist her colleague?

This was a brand new cafe and their training should be fresh in their minds. A basic level of customer service was sorely missing on Tuesday afternoon. I was shocked at the little regard they had for their customers.

Is this another example of cut price retailers so desperate to make their profit margins that they don’t ‘do’ training?

Customer focus is the simplest form of marketing to apply in retail. Acknowledging and greeting customers, and understand what they’re there to do and what they want. It’s about social interaction and conversation.  This is what will retain customers and keep them loyal even when mistakes are made.