Never Mind Marketing

Riffing off Donald Keough’s book The Ten Commandments for Business Failure, Risk Capital Partners investor Luke Johnson pens his own steps for killing your company for the Financial Times. If you want to survive, he advises avoiding the following:

• taking on too much debt
• becoming overly dependent on one customer
• making a mess of a major IT project
• signing a costly/long-term property lease, or
• forgetting your customers.

“In case you’re wondering: yes, over the years I’ve backed companies guilty of all these mistakes,” says Johnson. (Hat tip, peHUB)

A year ago, KillerStartups bought the killer domain name Startups.com for a few hundred thousand dollars. The company didn’t do anything with it other than redirect to the KillerStartups blog. Today, it realunched as a Q&A site for business questions.

In, what I can only describe as a blend of digg.com, Twitter, LinkedIn Answers, PartnerUp, and GoBIGNetwork, Startups.com allows soon-to-be-business owners to ask questions like, “What is the typical annual income of a freelance webdesigner?”, “How can I copyright an idea?” (Answer: You can’t. Ideas aren’t protected by copyright), and “How can I promote my new restaurant?”

Users can also ask questions via Twitter (@askstartups), monitor tags like “management”, “marketing”, “copyright”.

Have you looked at it? What do you think?

I already hear the sound of “gurus” looking for new jobs.

Well said, JBHMarketing:

the best social marketing is orchestrated via a plan, and should be a coordinated marketing effort by someone experienced in social marketing. If done right, it will compliment the marketing taking place elsewhere and marketing is always more effective when all components compliment each other.

Mashable’s Spark of Genius series review of “BookFresh”:

Quick Pitch: BookFresh makes it easy for new and existing customers to connect with businesses and schedule an appointment online.

Genius Idea: BookFresh is an online appointment book that small businesses can use to easily schedule appointments for their services, take payments online and integrate with existing websites or even Facebook.

I love being able to schedule appointments with businesses online. I don’t always have time to schedule an appointment during business hours (or more to the point, I forget to schedule during business hours) and being able to see availabilities and schedule things in advance is always really nice. BookFresh (formerly HourTown) is a whole suite of tools for small businesses to integrate into their online sites.

With it, customers can make appointments online, pay in advance (via PayPal), get an e-mail reminder of the appointment, and even schedule an appointment from a company’s Facebook page. BookFresh will send business owners SMS messages when an appointment is made, lets them sync their appointment book with iCal or Google Calendar and review appointments before confirming them. BookFresh also has an iPhone app for businesses to keep track of their appointments and bookings.

[more...]

I think that having the ability to book an appointment with a business via their Facebook or other social profiles could definitely help a small business owner stand out from the crowd.

Say you’re the CEO of a business and your project manager comes to you with his proposal that will be going out to investors, business partners, and potential clients.  Then you find that your manager has used “4” instead of “four”, “r” instead of “are”, and abbreviations such as lol, atm, and idk.  How would you react?  I thought so.
While you’d probably cringe under your desk for a few days, the truth of the matter is that this type of language permeates conversations on the web.  This shorthand, sometimes called “AIM speak” as it first originated on instant messenger platforms such as AOL IM, indeed makes typing and texting a faster and easier affair, but it has muddled the lines of grammar.

[more...]

Daniel Wadleigh presented an interesting idea about combining various vehicles of advertising to gain a positive impact greater than that of two individual campaigns. He says:

Remember the principles: People remember 10% of what they see. People remember 20% of what they hear. People remember 60% of what they see and hear. Image enhancing ads try to generate the warm fuzzies about the results of using your product or service. It’s emotional responses that have the best retention value, and the highest impact. Direct response ads try to activate a response, now! A combination of both elements generates more responses.

A study appearing in “Sales and Marketing Management” magazine announced that “research consistently demonstrates” that:

Direct mail = 1% return of sales

Telemarketing = 4% return of sales (commercial calls)

Combo = 12% return of sales

The principle has to do with both name recognition and the warm fuzzies. As a rule, it is natural for people to try and “categorize” every piece of exposure, as soon as possible. We judge anyone that we meet, or hear about, or get a call from, as either:

1) useful to us

2) neutral

3) risky to us

You’ve got to stay out of “Zone #3.” When there is a mail piece received before an ad or phone call, or, vice versa: when there is a media ad before a mail piece or phone call, it at least moves the categorizing up the scale by one, or even two.

As most sophisticated marketers know by now, performance advertising on Facebook is significantly different from search engine marketing. While SEM is fundamentally keyword-targeted, meaning advertisers bid on keywords, Facebook Ads is fundamentally profile-targeted, meaning advertisers bid on people. As a result, the ad copy, call to action, and graphics need to be rethought and re-designed for the “people-targeted” Facebook world – not just copied and pasted from your Google AdWords campaign.

[read more]

Facebook ads allow for Location Targeting, Keyword Targeting, Connection & Group Targeting, Age and Gender Targeting, Birthday Targeting, Education Targeting, Workplace, and Language Targeting

Jeff Bezos shares his business tip ‘Short List’ … and it’s short. Great tips by Amazon.com founder, Jeff Bezos

A reminder to think outside the box when creating advertising campaigns:

Unfortunately, I see it too often; passionate business owners overwhelmed by the constant demands of owning or running a business. Running a business can actually get in the way of running a business!

I have put together some thoughts and key gems of information I have found useful over the years to help you run your business rather than the business run you.

KEEP THE PLAIN THINGS THE MAIN THINGS
Remember why you went into business? I’ll bet it wasn’t to have the most Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers, or hits to a website. I’ll bet you didn’t worry about quarterly taxes, phone book ads, networking groups, or product packaging. Rather, you had a passion for something you did well. From creating crafts to helping people have better skin, you got into business because of a passion.

Step back and write down WHY you went into business. Make this the element your business revolves around.

ESTABLISH CORE VALUES
What is important to you in business? What are values you want evident in your daily operations? Individuals or small companies often avoid core values because they are unnecessarily made too complex. In actuality, they are simple. Make a list of four or five characteristics or goals you have for your business. Core values can range from “Meet 2 new people a day”, “Give away one sample to a needy client”, “Leadership Development”, or “Work above reproach”.

When starting any new business venture, I identify the key values (it could be a word, a short sentence, or a paragraph), type them out, print on nice cardstock, and frame it. These values then sit on my desk or office wall as a constant reminder. When I was faced with difficult decisions, I refer to them for guidance.

For an entire year, the value guiding one of my companies was “Build Relationships”, (Warning: this is a VERY broad value) in everything we did, it was to build and grow employee, customer, vender, and community relationships.

NETWORK. YOUR WAY
Business networking has been bastardized. There is a very real, and a very unfortunate, reason that I refuse to attend or be a part of 99% of business networking groups. Networking, at its core, is about relationships. People don’t care what you know until they know that you care. Too many network-attendees have forgotten that sales do not come from forcing a product down the throat of others; sales come from building a reputable connection with others.

If traditional networking groups have left a bad taste in your mouth, don’t give up on it altogether. Instead, call up a business owner with similar clients, or something you have an interest in. Buy them coffee and get to know them. Ask about their business, how they got started, their perfect client, etc. In return, share a little about your business. Don’t sell them anything, just talk to them.

This relaxed atmosphere does not lend itself to “Buy My Stuff Now” marketing, but rather facilitates relational-networking. I guarantee that person will remember you for years after your meeting.

TO-DO, TO-DO, TO-DO
One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received tackles the “To-Do List”. The list that keeps us awake at night, never gets shorter, and – eventually – gets abandoned in the dark abyss of offices everywhere.

The advice I received was: keep 2 lists.

What? How does that help me!?

They explained, keep two lists. One for “Today (or “Current Project”) and one for “Long-Term Goals & Ideas”. Ah! It seemed so logical.

Think about how often you have gone to bed discouraged that you didn’t finish everything on your list. But how many of those tasks needed to be finished today? Maybe you did 5, 6, or 7 small things, but are dreading the big ones – break it up! Break up huge projects into smaller tasks.

I jot down ideas for businesses that may never come to fruition, those ideas and tasks used to take up room on my “To-Do” list, now I am okay knowing that they don’t need to get done today and don’t discourage me from attacking the “Today List”

YOU CAN’T DO EVERYTHING – AND THAT IS OK
I hate payroll. Hate it. I hate adding everything up, inputting data into QuickBooks, managing new tax tables, etc. I hated it so much I would avoid going into the office on Thursday before payday. It actually crippled my desire to do other work – the work I loved!

It took me awhile to realize that my effort to save money was actually costing me more. I didn’t hire a bookkeeper because of the added expense to my young company, but I didn’t factor the time I was spending 1) avoiding work, 2) managing payroll, and 3) staying educated on new rules, etc.

I worked out a deal with my bookkeeper to exchange services – they were ecstatic to get free and discounted samples and I was relieved to not have to touch QuickBooks again!

Who can you exchange services for to lighten your load?

BONUS: ASK FOR HELP
There are thousands of business owners out there, and most of them are willing to help others. If you are truly stumped, ask for help.

What tips would you suggest for those struggling with running their business?