Small Business Marketing: Part 3 of a 3 Part Series

This is the last of a 3 part series on small business marketing. Part 1 listed three reasons that small business owners avoid marketing efforts. Part 2 listed three quick examples of why marketing is important. This final part lists 7 steps that small business owners can take to improve their marketing results.

Ways To Improve Small Business Marketing

Individually, these are all good ideas for small business marketing and books worth of advice have been written about each idea. The real power comes from putting them together in a way that each step builds on the previous.

1. Be “Remarkable”
   See Seth Godin’s Purple Cow. Build something that is “worth making a remark about”. Have a story to tell about yourself and your products. People won’t want to sell for you, but they will share interesting stories about you.
   Do something different than your competitors. Have your own unique marketplace niche. If your competitors compete as “the lowest price” you won’t get to remarkable by being “lower than the lowest price!”. If your competitors compete by being large or by being small and personal, you won’t win by being larger or smaller or more personal. Do something differently.
2. Participate In, Listen To, and Learn From Your Customers’ Community
   Before you can do the next step (Be Heard) you have to do a lot of listening and learning yourself. Go where your customers’ are, both physically and online. Find out where your customers meet in person and get invited to attend. Find where your customers meet online and actively participate. In both cases, don’t participate by selling your product (see #7). Instead first just listen then start offering real, helpful advice. From this participation you will get more and more chances to be heard.
3. Be Heard
   Because you are doing #1-Be Remarkable, you will have plenty of interesting things to blog about. Because you are doing #2 in the list-Listen to your Customers, you will know what is interesting to them.
   Blog, blog, and blog some more. Start blogging well before your product is released. Don’t wait until you are asking people to buy. Ian Landsman, developer of help desk software HelpSpot, wrote about how he found success at starting to blog well before a product is released. Read the excellent book for small business bloggers, Clear Blogging by Bob Walsh.
4. Offer a Free Trial or Service
   When people hear about your product or services, make it easy for them to try out themselves. Offer free samples, trials, or introductory services and don’t expect prospects to jump through hoops. This is especially important online. A two page sign-up form simply stands between you and a prospect and does not make it easy and free to try.
5. Be Welcoming – Make it Easy for People to Send Feedback
   After a person has tried your service, make it easy for them to provide feedback. Put a feedback page on your website and put a link in your product and emails to that feedback page.

   Build places on your website where people can easily and voluntarily share some information about themselves that will help you better meet their needs. But don’t ask for every piece of information that you think might be valuable in marketing. For example, an insurance agent’s quote request page should ask for car make and model but not favorite hobbies. Make your information request and feedback processes frictionless and be sure to respond promptly.

6. Ask For and Track Feedback, Testimonials, and Referrals
   Now that you are getting feedback, use the positive feedback as testimonials. Also, ask those the provided positive feedback for referrals. Finally, track referral activity so that you can thank the referrer, giving your customer an even more positive experience.
7. Let Others Do the Talking
   When you boast about your own product, no one will believe you anyway. We have built a natural response to ignore others’ bragging. Don’t waste time on what gets ignored, instead be an informed expert (see #2) and make it as easy as possible for others to try out your product (see #4), to initiate conversations with you (see #5), and to share with others how great your products are (see #6).

Small business marketing can be almost systematic and does take planning. There are many small business marketing systems out there (here’s one we are building) to facilitate some of this so that you can focus on building even more remarkable products and services.

Note:
See also Improve Lead Conversion by Avoiding These 6 Marketing Mistakes

3 Examples of the Impact of Effective Marketing: Part 2 of a 3 Part Series

This is the second article in a three part series on getting started at small business marketing. In the first article I wrote about 3 reasons that micro-ISV and other company founders avoid small business marketing or start too late. In this article we take a quick look at three examples of where it takes more than a great product to get noticed in the marketplace.

Example 1: What’s Hot?

How many times have you seen a company success story to which your first response is “Hey, I could have done that!”? You see a Google acquisition or a hot startup on the cover of Business 2.0 and, if you are like me, you sometimes immediately think “That’s not so hot”.

What we are forgetting is that it is not the product that made the buzz. Most press mentions and awards and referrals are not about the product. They are about the story behind it; the way people feel about the creators of the product, the conversations people had about it. All things influenced by a company’s marketing and PR efforts.

Example 2: Musicians vs. Labels

Where do you stand on the digital rights management (DRM) and music revenues debate? Record labels are vilified in the popular blogosphere for being bloodsucking, greedy, enterprises that care only about money and not the music.

These devilish descriptions of record labels may be true – after all, the record labels are in business too which means seeking the lowest supply costs and the highest revenue margins – but we are not debating that here. The point for this article is this: the musician is the builder. The record label is the marketer. While many people decry the marketer’s unfair leverage, small companies can learn from this example that marketing provides leverage and value.

Interlude: Yes, The Product Does Matter

The remarkability of your product is very important. I’ll say it again. Please do develop remarkable products. In fact, a remarkable product is the basis of effective marketing.

This is not about making junk and marketing it well. It is not about selling sand to Saharans. This is about how even with a super product, it is the additional marketing activities that push that product to the next level. The final example helps illustrate this point.

Example 3: Three Steps to the Jolt Award

As final example of the importance of marketing your product, look at this
article from Andrew Binstock, an industry veteran, writer and judge in the software industry’s top prize, the Jolt Award. Here he offers three steps to become a Jolt Award Finalist.

Quoting Binstock,

1. Have a good product. This more than any other factor will improve your prospects.

2. Articulate why your product is better than others. Many vendors set up portals specifically for Jolt judges. They include movie clips of the product (10-15 minutes), screen shots, and generated reports. This is a superb idea.

3. Follow up with the judges. Send me a press kit in the mail. Some companies used to send ‘swag’—an industry terms for those inexpensive promotional chotchkas vendors give out. In a sea of choices, having a name to remember and with which I can associate specific features is a big plus.

Binstock’s step 1 is all about product. Steps 2 and 3 are all about PR and marketing. The point: don’t just build a product and expect people to love it and flock to it.

How?

But what do you do when you have years of experience building and almost none marketing what you build? Maybe you came from a company where marketing was its own department and now you are the marketer. In the next and final article we’ll talk about just that.

Part 2 of the series is here.

3 Reasons Business Owners Avoid Marketing – Part 1 of a 3 Part Series

Whether it’s marketing departments at Fortune 500 companies or a small business marketing team, I’ve observed the split between those that produce the product and those that try to attract customers to it. In these companies its not the job of the producer of the product to market it. As a small business owner, you do not have that split though.

So, here are a few thoughts on why small business marketing is important and why small business owners may not think of themselves as the marketing department. In my next articles I’ll share seven tips on how to practice small business marketing without becoming a salesperson.

3 Reasons New Business Owners Don’t Put Too Much Planning into Marketing

Bob Walsh reminded his readers of an excellent, relevant video of a Seth Goodin presentation to Google called All Marketers are Liars. Godin’s right – marketers are liars (it’s called puffery). And who wants to be a “liar”? Not me. Not you.

Yet the truth is that competency at a task does not correlate to how well the resulting products are received or celebrated. This is a hard thing for microISVs and most small businesses owners to hear. Here are three reasons why people put too little thought into their small business marketing plans.

1. They’ve been told they’re the best programmer (or lawn care guy, accountant, painter, etc) that people have ever worked with. What more could people want?
   Yet company owners are only paid if they get “hired”. Being great at building the product or service the company offers does not make one great at getting “hired” in the first place.
2. They Have Such Personal Excitement About Their Product That They Don’t See How Anyone Could Not Immediately Just Want It?
   Again, people could only want it if they hear about it. The marketing efforts we will talk about in the next article are all about helping people hear about a product, try products, and talk with others about their experiences.
3. They Don’t Want To Be One of Those Slimy Greedy Salespeople.
   They’re not alone in this aversion to sales. Katherine B. Hartman, a marketing professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington says that in an analysis of movies and TV shows from 1903 to 2005 “the salesperson character personifies some of society’s most despised characteristics-greed, deception, distrust, and selfishness.”

So I’m not proposing all small business owners become salespeople. I’m recommending that new companies should plan from the beginning for the marketability of their products, services, and business and have a small business marketing plan. In fact, make it part of deciding what product or services to offer.

Part two of this series is here.

New Feature: Measure Marketing Results

LeadsOnRails.com now has a reports to help users measure marketing results. Details here. Next up: we are tying these effectiveness reports directly to lead capture web forms to help users develop effective web campaigns.

Blogging and White Papers Are Not Free

Authoring white-papers, newsletters, and blog entries can certainly be effective marketing tools. To know just how effective you need to measure costs and resulting leads. But too often business owners forget to account for their own time.

White Papers, E-Mail, and Webinars

This month’s (March 2007) issue of Inc. magazine has an article called “Wooing Customers One White Paper at a Time” (the subject of the article has invested over $2 million in white papers over the years). Dan Dershem of LeanLogistics is featured and shares his marketing budget. Here are some key points:

Marketing budget as percent of revenue:
2006: 7%
2007: 4.6%

Lead Acquisition:
e-newsletter budget up by 130%.
webinar budget down by 55%.

This is one company focussing on e-newsletters because they’ve found them inexpensive and effective. Dersham reports that e-mail campaigns resulted in double the number of leads at one-sixth the cost of producing a Webinar.

Many small business owners write their own e-mail campaigns which keeps cost down. Yet, if you author your own company’s emails, whitepapers, and blog entries, then you might be underestimating the cost of those marketing efforts.

If you run a report like this (ignore the numbers, they are fake and not the point of this article):

make sure that you are including your time in the estimate of lead acquisition and marketing cost. (Click here
to see the system that created this report).

Whether it be maintaining a blog or writing emails, you need to assign yourself an effective hourly rate and estimate much time you spend on those activities. Armed with this info you can then get a true picture of the marketing effectiveness of those activities.

Alternative Authors?

Why is this important? Why measure something if you are not going to change it? That’s a good question. So the second part of this article is a call to business owners to measure alternatives as well. What if you had others in the company or professional copy writers author your emails? What if you bought industry newsletters? What if you paid a blogger?

It might be worthwhile to try a professionally written campaign and then measure results. Just be sure to include the cost of your time in the self-authored campaigns.

Technical Note: Basecamp Interaction, Not Integration

For you tech types – here’s a couple examples of technical interaction in place of integration. A user wanted to pull files from Basecamp, the 37Signals application, into their LeadsOnRails application as read-only background information for a salesperson talking with a client.

37Signals provides an Application Programming Interface (API) for just such interfaces. Yet retrieval of files are not supported by the API. All is not lost though because we simply put a link into their LeadsOnRails screen which, when clicked, searches for and displays the user’s files using good old http urls – the same urls that the Basecamp search button creates. (The user needs to manually log into Basecamp once).

This is a very simple example yet one can easily imagine more complex technical examples such as gMail interactions where the url is not readily apparent and one page can often have dozens of requests. Google supports some integration efforts with APIs. But just because there is not an API does not mean you cannot interact with it, especially when talking web applications.

Side note: We see these type of interactions between people all of the time. Especially in the corporate world of org. charts and hierarchys. There is a formal way and “other” ways to accomplish goals, share information, and make decisions. And with people, it is often the informal way that gets results.

Don’t let the lack of a formal system, agrement or contract keep you from making improvements (both technical and personal) to your interactions and relationships.

How to Add Digg-This Buttons to Your Typo Blog

Here is how I added Digg voting buttons to a Rails powered Typo blog. Digg buttons come in several types. You can build out a full-size Digg button, a compact sized one, or use your own image. I’m adding compact buttons.

See here for details on Digg button html code and all the different options. When you have chosen what options you want to use, here’s the code that worked for me.

app/views/articles/read.rhtml

This is the view in Typo rendered when a single article is shown. Because this view is the view to the article, you do not need to tell Digg the URL. (Digg assumes the current URL when the diggthis script is called).

Here’s code that worked for me. Again, review the details on the Digg site for other options. The key for Typo users is that the digg_title can be set to the name of the article. I inserted this code right after the line with author_link(@article).

<script type="text/javascript">
    digg_skin = 'compact';
    digg_title = <%= "'" + h(@article.title) + "'" %>;
    </script>
<script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>

app/views/articles/_article.rhtml

_article.rhtml is a partial used in typo to show an article in the blog’s list of articles. Because each article in the list will have a different URL to send to Digg, you will want to set the digg_url parameter as in this example. In the call to article_url, the false parameter makes sure that the entire path is set in the url. I added this code right before the <%= article.body_html %> line.

<p>
  <script type="text/javascript">
    digg_skin  = 'compact';
    digg_title = <%= "'" + h(article.title) + "'" %>;
    digg_url   = <%= "'" + article_url(article, false) + "'" %>;
  </script>
  <script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript">
  </script>
</p>

Try it out

Now, next time you enter a new article, you’ll have Digg buttons where readers can Digg your writing. Try it out.

RailsWeek.com

Most of the time, my blog articles with actual code in them will be found over at my Rails blog – RailsWeek.com. Please subscribe to that one if you find Rails code tips and tricks interesting.

Are Tell-a-Friend Forms Evil Spam or a Convenience for Readers?

Activity from “Share this”, “tell a friend” and other social networking links is creating “vast quantities of complaints”, according to Tom Kulzer, CEO of AWeber, a provider of email newsletter delivery and auto-responder services.

Tell-a-friend forms allow someone to send an email to another person via the web server of a third-party. For an example, go to Yahoo.com, click on a news story and click on the “email story” link at the bottom. Tell-a-friend (TAF) forms are a popular way to let users easily share items they find interesting. To those in the business or reliable email delivery, social-networking TAF forms are too popular.

Kulzer has responded to the launch of several “Tell A Friend” services with a reminder that their customers cannot use his service and tell a friend forms on the same website. He notes that because the recipient of the email did not request it, emails generated by TAF forms can be considered spam. I can see his point and can see his concern. It is his job to ensure his service remains reliable and reputable and is in no way associated with spam.

Yet, I wonder if he and some readers have fully thought this through. Kulzer mentions chain-of-custody concerns yet I fail to see where his service would ever have custody of an email delivered by a tell-a-friend form.

(Regardless, he says that if a component on your website delivers and email that results in a spam complaint, then “any other service” on your website is open to spam complaints. I’m certain Kulzer knows can-spam law inside-and-out. Yet, does he really mean “any other service”? Even if the “other service” has never touched the email that is the subject of the complaint, does not run on the same webhost as the TAF form, or has nothing to do with email at all – e.g. PayPal, flickr plugins? It will be interesting to see the details of this claim as the discussion continues.)

Kulzer points out that just because others are using TAF forms does not make it all right. I agree with him there. Yet, I wonder if users that applaud the decision, and say they avoid companies that use TAF, really avoid Yahoo, CNN, Wall Street Journal, Amazon, and the many other mainstream companies with TAF forms? Is there a social-networking tell-a-friend boycott in the works?

What do you think? Do you use tell-a-friend forms where your website sends an email to another person on a reader’s behalf when they find something interesting? Do you think tell-a-friend is spam or a convenience to users? Have you had complaints from tell-a-friend forms?

7 Reasons Blogs Do Not Have Digg Buttons and Why Your Blog Should

In his book Clear Blogging, Bob Walsh recommends making it easy for your blog readers to add your posts to social bookmarking sites like Digg. Why wouldn’t a blog have “Digg This” buttons? Here’s seven possible reasons along with recommendations to get past these objections and try it out.

1. I don’t even know what “Digg” is or why I’d want to participate.

Digg is a “user driven social content website”. This means that users determine what gets popular and what gets buried. Authors of content that other Digg users find interesting are rewarded with increased visibility to even more Digg users and search engines. Users submit stories. Users promote and bury stories. Digg is a way for quality content to get promoted and shared and useless content to get ignored.

A “Digg This” button on your blog gives Digg users a place to click to recommend an article you’ve written. If other users agree with the recommendation, your writing could get more exposure.

2. I don’t want to be conceited and presume my writing is worthy of a “Digg”

The beauty of Digg and other social bookmarking sites is that the users get to decide. By offering a “Digg This” button, all you are doing is giving readers a choice.

If no one recommends your writing, it means your content is not striking a particularly strong or unique chord with your readers or your readers are not Digg users. See #3 and #5.

3. I don’t want my readers to feel like I am begging them for praise.

People love to share things they find interesting and useful. People love to say, “Hey – look what I’ve found.” People love to share good things with their community. Don’t think of the “Digg This” button as a request for praise. Instead, think of it as a service to your readers. Digg users don’t recommend stories for the benefit of the author; they do it to be active members of the Digg community.

4. I don’t want my website cluttered with unnecessary buttons, banners, or other flashy stuff.

Digg buttons and other social bookmarking links can be very unobtrusive. See the small, compact links on this site.

5. Sounds OK so far, but I don’t care a bit about being popular, I just want to write.

Most blogs are written for an audience and most writers hope to appeal to their audience. Don’t think of Digg as a popularity contest. Think of it as a feedback mechanism for your readers. If you want to know what your readers like and don’t like, Digg is one way to find out. Google analytics can show you which articles people read, but will not show you if readers find it interesting. Results from Digg will help you focus in on what content and writing style most strikes a chord with your readers.

6. I heard the whole thing is rigged anyway.

There have been stories of writers working the system to get Digg votes. Maybe people get an extensive network of friends to recommend their content even if the content is not that great. Maybe some power-bloggers have control and can steer contributors’ Digg destiny. I don’t know. Regardless, this is one of those situations in which the “it can’t hurt” approach comes into play. Even if there is a game at play here, it can’t hurt to be recommended in Digg or other social bookmarking sites. There is no downside.

7. I don’t know how to add a “Digg This ” button.

This is probably a legit reason many bloggers don’t have Digg buttons. Digg makes it as easy as possible. Add this one line to your blog.

<script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Where to add this line differs depending on what blog engine you are using. If you are using the Rails powered Typo blog engine, you can find specific directions here.

See Digg’s integration page here for more details and other options to make the button look like almost anything you want.

Are there other reasons you have not added “Digg-This” buttons to your blog? Am I missing anything from this list?

Target Marketing with Google Trends

In an earlier post I talked about leveraging traditional marketing efforts, even when engaged in internet marketing activities. If you have an online company, traditional media can be used for awareness campaigns. Though many marketing principles are the same online as offline, traditional media (e.g. print, postcards, magazines) often has an added restriction of local or regional scope that you do not usually find online. Traditional media also has more strict time boundaries than online promotion (SEO, etc). So where and when to market becomes a bigger question offline than with Internet marketing. Google Trends can help.

For example, run a Google Trends report to see in what US cities and what time of year are people using Google to search for pool toys.

In this example, the cities and times of year are not surprising (except maybe for St. Louis and Newark – who knew?). The demand fluctuations in the pool toy market are clearly shown in the time graph. If you run an online pool toy store and want to place local advertisements or partner with local pool stores to drive traffic to your site, these cities could be good starting points.

Try Google Trends with your product or common search terms and see if there are any surprises there.