Digital media: danger zone for small business marketers

It’s a small business marketers’ dream world. Digital media gives us immediate access to customers and prospects. We can e-mail, podcast, Facebook and RSS them. Now we can Twitter and Plurk them.

But from a marketing standpoint, there’s a dark side. Just because the technology is available (and fun and cool), doesn’t mean it is right for your company. Far too many businesses are using digital media tools without thinking through the strategy behind them. Equally alarming, many businesses overlook or ignore the basics in favor of adding more digital media capabilities. Three clients we met with recently have Web sites that are woefully out of date. They have no organized way of reviewing and updating, and even worse, no one in house or outsourced who is set up to quickly and efficiently make updates.

We’re not saying you shouldn’t use new media, just that you need to use it with the same thought and carefully analysis you would use with any other marketing tools. Read the whole article.

Strategic Marketing Means Tackling More than Low Hanging Fruit

Your house is a mess. It's easy to pick up the dirty clothes, straighten the shoes left by the back door, make the beds. You know, the easy stuff. But when was the last time you reorganized dressers and closets? Climbed a ladder to dust the tops of light fixtures and moldings? Or bent low to clean your cabinet under the sink? Now if you did that, your house would be really clean. But who has time? Or the energy to do all that?

Can much the same can be true of your marketing efforts? Too often we spend our time addressing "low hanging fruit". Like the clothes left on the floor, we spruce up what's easy and not especially time consuming. Get a new logo, ask the agency to come up with some new ads, write a few press releases and leave the harder stuff like market research and strategic goal setting to another day.

Today, Brandcurve.com comments on this very issue. Seems Toys R Us has a cute new logo. Is the logo good enough to hide the fact that their stores are crowded, difficult to navigate and rate badly on customer service? Not really. I'd suggest they are just trying to sweep the bad stuff under a pretty new rug.

Want to know how you can tackle your strategic marketing? Log on to our website for free tools!

Rid your Business Documents of Abstractions

Is your organization a world-class provider of cutting-edge solutions? Do your people offer turn-key robust service? I’m sure you do. Unfortunately, your customers and donors have no idea what all those abstractions really mean or should mean to them.

We might criticize teenagers for talking in a language that defies comprehension (whose BFF R U?), but if you are writing business documents, be careful that your messages can be easily understood. Business language, no matter what the business, is too often laden with meaningless jargon. In fact, it’s so common that we stop recognizing the words as meaningless hype.

If you want to build your brand (who doesn’t) stop using mumbo-jumbo and start talking so that your messages are crystal clear.

Want to know how? Log on to our website and read this month's enews for our top tips.

7 Rules for Best Managing the Production Process

Your sales team is screaming for the brochure that you promised in time for their sales blitz. The copy revisions you sent four departments for approval were due back a week ago and no one has responded. The annual report you need for a major board of directors meeting is late coming in from the printer. Your e-newsletter was due out four days ago and you don’t have an idea for a topic yet.

Whether you’re a small business or a non-profit marketer, trying to get materials created, produced and printed on time and with the requisite approvals can be enough to make you hide under your desk.  But before you surrender to the chaos that often surrounds production, here are our top seven rules for bringing some order to your world.

1. It has to be right
2. Plan backwards
3. Be careful what you promise
4. Manage the input, or it will manage you
5. Automate
6. Build in some margin
7. Know thy vendors

Want to learn more? Check out the Fixyourmarketing.com enewsletter for the whole scoop.

What Every Small Business Owner Needs: Insider Advice!

Marketing for your small business? If you need a helping hand (don't we all) and a little insider information (this kind is perfectly legal) check out Inside Small Business from Logoworks. This is an interesting site, chock full of articles and a blog where experts advise on a wide variety of subjects including customer service, website development , credit and taking cues from the giants of Wall Street. And while you are there, you can peruse their logo design services too.

Shortcuts to Calculating your Marketing Budget

Your CEO has asked you for the 2008 marketing budget. Yuck. Why does budgeting time seem to creep up on you each and every year? And we know you'd like to find someone to do the work for you or maybe just provide a few estimates of what you'll need for marketing (with a nice little increase over last year), get it approved and call it a day.

But that doesn't work (if it does, please let us know how or where!). Instead, you will likely be asked to justify each and every red cent you want to spend and what it will generate in terms of revenue. Even worse, you may be handed a budget figure based on some arbitrary formula that doesn't take your goals and objectives into consideration.

What to do? How do you come up with a workable budget - and get it approved? Start by reading our free enewsletter on this very subject!

Find Out What Your Customers Really Think of You

Ask a group of randomly chosen customers to tell you the first word that comes to mind when they think of you. Would you be surprised by the results? It's important to take stock and know what your customers think of your organization, your marketing, your service, your website, your delivery and more.

Take a look at Brandcurve's post today and ponder the results of their free association wrap up. Then consider doing some research on your own. We like Zoomerang and Survey Monkey for our clients. These are low cost tools that provide powerful results.

Mid Year Marketing Check: Are You Making Good Grades?

If you had to grade your marketing for the first half of 2007, how would you do? "A" for effort, but short on results? "C-" for being stuck in a rut, doing the same things but not reaching the goals you set?

This mid-year point is a great time to take a hard, close look at what you're doing: what's working and what's not. It's a time to be brutally honest in your assessments and fearless in looking at new and better ways to create the marketing organization you want. Read our July e-newsletter to find the right questions to ask in order to answer whether you are right on course, or need to change your direction.

Why Your Customers Won't Wait

Are you losing sales, clients or prospects to competitors who are faster, nimbler or more responsive? These days, your customers and prospects can get the information and products they need almost instantly. If you can’t do that for them, they’re simply not willing to wait. Speedy interactive web sites, email, text messaging and all those other technology tools that keep us so connected have trained us to expect immediate responses.

Here’s what you can do if you are hearing lots of “I already bought it somewhere else” or you get lots of inquiries but can’t seem to close the sale.

Look at your sales processes. Do a little flow chart – doesn’t have to be anything fancy – of how your prospects hear about you, contact you and buy from you. Look at the time between inquiries and responses, offers and the actual sale. Where are the gaps in your process that keep your customer waiting – and that give them opportunity to look elsewhere?

Automate your processes. With all the technology available to you, there’s really no excuse for not having a bang-up system for responding immediately to people who show you they are interested. That might mean emails that go out automatically and interactive tools on your web site that guide people through the sales process (or event the information gathering process).

Make it easy to buy. Don’t you want to make the sales transaction as easy as possible for your prospects and customers? We’re amazed at the unintentional road blocks people put in their sales processes – everything from too much paperwork to convoluted policies that discourage buyers to plain old bad service. If you can’t make it easy on your customers, they’ll find someone who will. Check out Converting Telephone Inquiries into Sales. It’s good advice for all types of inquiries, not just telephone.

Four days. That’s the time limit one of our clients has for handling sales leads. If you can’t contact the prospect within four business days, they say drop the lead and move on to someone else. It’s not that they don’t care about that lead, it’s just that their research shows after the four day mark the chance of making the sale is almost zero. That person has purchased from someone else – or is so far along the sales process that it’s too late.

And speaking of four, a recent study from Akamai and JupiterResearch showed that the average online shopper will wait four seconds for a site to load before they move on. That’s right – you have four seconds to get your page loaded and wow that prospect.

Your response cycle may be four seconds or four days. But whatever it is, you better get to your prospects in a hurry – or someone else will.

New Takes on Networking: Get Out There!

Does the thought of networking make you shudder, with visions of randomly handing out business cards to people or sitting through "official" networking events with dozens of other people trying to meet people?

Hold on. While networking is an old concept, you may need to update your thinking about what it really means. Like every marketing strategy for small business and nonprofit marketers, your networking should be strategic. There's real value in building a network of contacts and resources who can help you with everything from business and operations challenges to finance, housing, medical care and more. And beyond the obvious benefits of having a contact you can call on, there's a serendipity about networking. Who knows who you might meet - and who they might know.

Here are a couple of good sources for strategic networking tips that cover everything from using email to targeting your networking to the worst networking mistakes. You've probably heard of Scott Ginsberg, who always wears a name tag. He's built his networking into an art - and a business. Check out his "51 Thoughts on Networking." And entrepreneur.com has a series of easy reading articles that include networking for introverts, networking etiquette and more.

So before you move networking to the bottom of your to-do list again, re-think it. Building a bigger network just might be easier - and more productive - than you think.