Internet Tips from Doug Richards and More

I know it's nearly two weeks ago, but this is still fresh in my mind. Fay and I went to the Enterprise Nation Home Business Conference on 20th November and apart from meeting lots of like minded small businesses (with big plans to grow and good luck to us all), picked up some good marketing tips.

First of all, keynote speaker on sales and marketing Doug Richards, now running School for StartUps, couldn't emphasise enough:

• Low cost and value for money marketing is good whether you're a small or large business
• That means that using social media is a good idea for most of us. I would add to that, you still need to make time for it but most social networks are free to join and use and if you don't participate you miss out being seen if nothing else
  
• Video, video and more video! It's so low cost and easy to use even a basic video camera and set up a free YouTube account. I'll add to that Google likes video (it owns YouTube), it adds interest to your website and being on YouTube gets you links to your website.
• The other thing about video on social networks is that quality isn't as important as content. So if you've got something to say, why not try video - far more interesting than text? You can add video to Facebook, link to video on Twitter and embed it in your website.
  

You can find out more about Enterprise Nation on their website, and we're regular contributers to their blog posts we're pleased to say. Well, going on and on about marketing is something we're always happy to do...

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Isn't Social Networking for Young People?

This is the question I get asked most often when talking to businesses about Internet Marketing and in particular using social networks to communicate with their target audience.

The thing is, it's easy to forget that the people you are targeting probably use these media to communicate. Many of us struggle with the concept of marketing via social networks because we don't use them ourselves. It's true - many adults with busy home lives, businesses or other work commitments, simply don't have time to log on to Facebook when they get home. For many very successful marketers even, checking out what's happening on Twitter when we get up in the morning is not the first thing on the list. I've certainly noticed that a lot of 35 - 50 year old professionals are struggling with this one.

But that's not a strong enough argument not to add them to your marketing toolkit or even your media list. If you're trying to reach consumers (B2C or the general public), then these days individuals are even using their social network of choice as their search engine too. They're here to stay and we must consider them when we're marketing.

But just look at the stats for UK usage of social networks, it seriously isn't just young people...

Even for business to business (B2B, or marketing your services to other businesses), they are increasingly relevant because the Search Engines are starting to introduce social networking results into their search results - Google and Bing have now both signed a deal with Twitter to inlcude real time Tweets in results related to search terms. This shouldn't come as a surprise, given that search engines want as much current, relevant content as they can to match search queries and satisfy searchers.

So how do you use social networks for your marketing? Well you can start by looking at a Facebook Business Page. Do you write a blog, have pictures about your products or services, even video? You can post all of these onto your page - take a look at how some of the well known players use them, such as Coca -Cola.

If you do have video (if not, can you make one?), then set up an account on YouTube - it's free! Once you get your head around the "openness" of using these media, it becomes an opportunity to engage with your customers as never before. But that's another blog I think.

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Measurable Marketing is Easier Than You think

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don't know which half"

So said Jon Wanamaker, US department store merchant in the late 1800s. But you'll have heard many others quote this since, because advertising has been notoriously difficult to track, vexing even the best marketers for years. The reason for this is that data has been unreliable - even if you ask somebody where they heard about you, you're relying on them:

(a) Remembering
(b) Remembering it correctly

I recently put some thought to how much of our marketing can be measured now, so that you know what works and what doesn't. Having put together a good marketing plan, you need to know what got you the best results, ready for your next plan. If you do this with all of your marketing you should get better targeted marketing year on year and hopefully a better return on investment.

I came up with ten tips for measurable marketing activity in 2009:

1. Pay per click advertising, either on search engines such as Google, or social networking websites - as you have access to instant statistics for every advert that you run, including number of "clicks" and even "conversions" to sales or other activities that your visitor undertook.
2. Run a promotion or advertisement with a different telephone number then you know that all calls that come in on that number are related to that advertising campaign.
3. Start a blog...you can track the number of visitors to your website from the blog
4. Send a direct mail-shot and track it with a unique reference number or promotional code.
5. Tweet (Twitter) or join another public social network such as setting up a Facebook business page or LinkedIn public page. You can track referrals to your website and "mentions" of your business name or product.
6. Email marketing - find out how many people opened your email and what they did next.
7. Telemarketing - track every phone call, gather market intelligence and feedback
8. YouTube - are you an expert? Post a video on YouTube and track page views
9. Free online giveaway - collect email addresses to receive your free download/gift and count them!
10. Editorial - getting some press coverage either on or offline can be tracked with cuttings (offline) and equated to the equivalent advertising cost, or tracked online with Google Alerts.

I could go on... You can find some more good tips from Goris.com and some interesting info from Business Link about online marketing including the fact that it is so measurable. Meanwhile I'm pleased that as a marketer I can finally produce evidence and be more accountable for my clients. That's how it should be.

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Pay per Click Targeting Makes Advertising More Attractive

I've been researching pay per click advertising models in more depth recently as I help some of my clients to understand how it works and when to use it. Up until a few months ago, Google Adwords was becoming widely adopted by marketers for pay per click advertising (the sponsored results you see on the right hand page of Google's search results). Many of us thought this was enough as in The UK Google has around 80% share of the search market.

Other search engines have always offered it but suddenly their targeting has improved and with the advent of pay per click advertising in social networks such as Facebook we're getting more switched onto a more strategic "mix" of online advertising spend rather than giving it all to Google.

• Yahoo not so long ago added improved targeting options for advertisers which meant that instead of just search terms we could narrow by location and other demographic criteria. You can read more in this practical e-commerce blogpost about Yahoo advertising.
• Facebook pay per click uses incredibly powerful profiling (using information provided by Facebook members when they sign up) which means that your advert will appear to members grouped by not only location but age and other preferences.
• LinkedIn pay per click advertising also uses demographic profiles and now a range of options for LinkedIn advertising payment methods

It's only a matter of time before the likes of Twitter do the same, we're sure. The point is, I used to spend a lot of time talking clients out of spending - no sorry - wasting money on advertising. Today for many businesses it is a highly effective marketing medium and with statistical tracking as standard the results speak for themselves. I'm now in favour of more targeted online advertising, it certainly makes us more accountable as we can't argue with the stats.

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Seasonal Marketing for Inspiration

If you're not particularly creative but responsible for marketing your organisation, it can be difficult to constantly come up with new ideas to engage with your target audience.

Time to find out what day it is, or rather what interesting day is coming up. Cue seasonal marketing...

So it's January and you've done Christmas, but then in February we've got Valentine's day, March and April - Easter, Mother's day, May has two bank holidays and so on. Hooking up to one of our celebration events is an excellent way to kick start some creative thinking.

Can you tie in vouchers for any of these occasions? Or theme a discount or promotion around the event? Marks and Spencers came up with a gem in 2008 starting with Valentines day - dine in for £10.00. Brilliant! We're in the throes of credit crunch, we want a solution and with a bit of clever marketing "Your M & S" comes up with the right answer. It must have been good because others followed.

At the moment we really do have to work hard at making any offer attractive, so try this as a starting point.

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Customer Service? Not at the Bank.

It's easy to forget that customer service is a really critical part of the marketing mix and this is a problem because it's so often the first thing that goes wrong. How many times have you found just what you want (to buy) only to be disappointed when the seller is disinterested in the final outcome and quite frankly doesn't care whether you make the purchase or not?

In my case, too many times to mention, and this week I've experienced a real corker so it's driven me to this. The starting point of this story was a distressing fraudulent transaction on one of my business bank accounts. One brownie point to the bank here (the only one in the end) as they spotted it before I did and contacted me. So far so good.

Unfortunately we didn't manage to stop the money leaving my account to a suspicious sounding individual, who is now considerably better off than I am. From here the bank loses brownie points - I get a letter from them 2 days later (following several further frantic phone calls as I try and get my money refunded) confirming that my money has been refunded, and that my account was blocked from certain types of transaction, but I could still undertake other types. Good thinks me, I know where I am. Except they hadn't refunded my money, and the information about what they had blocked and what they hadn't, was completely incorrect.

I've spent a further 2 days this week trying to sort out the mess, including cheques to suppliers that will now bounce. Bearing in mind that I am the customer and this is no fault of my own - what happened to the customer service? I got passed from pillar to post, told different things by different people, finally getting cut off when they put me through to the complaints department!

Huge marketing mistake. Not only will I tell lots of people how bad this bank have been, I will move my account to a competitor (as soon as I can get back into the blasted thing). How to lose a customer and a reputation.

Unfortunately something tells me I shouldn't have expected anything else - didn't they get us into this mess in the first place?

End of marketing rant.

Karen McNulty
www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk

Recommendations and Referrals

The best marketing you can ask for is when somebody recommends or refers you to somebody else. Why is this the best? Well for a start it’s usually free but more importantly you’re getting a qualified lead that already trusts you because their contact has endorsed what you do.

We spend a lot of time getting our marketing message right, anxious to make sure that people believe what we’re telling them because we know how good our products and services are. But you know that advertising is never as powerful as somebody recommending a business to do business with.

Five reasons why referrals are good:

1. They’re usually free
2. Referred customers often spend more than those who come to you by other means (you’ve got the “trust” established from the off, so no time wasted)
3. You can ask for them confidently and easily if you know you’ve done a good job/sold an excellent product
4. Referrals give your business credibility
5. You can turn them into testimonials (always ask first) which you can add to your website, other marketing literature and newsletters.

How do you make sure you get people to recommend you?

Some businesses literally grow on referral marketing alone. Think of solicitors and accountants, alternative therapists and hairdressers. Without recommendations they would have to market much harder because these are all areas that are sensitive to the individual and require some element of trust for us to spend our money. These are our top tips on how to get referrals:

• Ask for them! You’d be surprised how many satisfied customers really don’t mind recommending you to somebody else. We’re all looking for excellent service and a positive buying experience so just a bit of encouragement to pass it on is all that’s needed.
• Offer an incentive. For example a 20% discount on their next purchase or cash back (have you noticed the banks doing this if you recommend a friend?)
• Follow up your clients after a purchase for feedback and then ask if you can use either a testimonial or if they will refer you to somebody else (whichever you feel is more appropriate)
• Use your marketing literature. When you pass out a business card, give them several so they can pass them on, or if you send out an email newsletter make sure you’ve got a “forward to a friend” button.

Think now about how many of your customers would recommend you – we bet there are a few. Time to put a plan into action!

Karen McNulty
MarketingPlanWiz

Has the SWOT moved on?

A very traditional part of a marketing plan and usually a business plan too, the SWOT analysis give us an excellent view of our business strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. I don't think for one minute we could replace it for strategic planning, but I have come across other models which help to define (in some ways much better) the direction we should follow for business.

I saw a presentation which really struck a chord, a few months ago delivered by Mike Kingston. He talked about defining the "right" customers for your business plan first, then checking that you are not breaking the main "law of business" which was essentially that you either specialise in a particular product or service or else you specialise by targeting a range of products or services to a very specific target market.

So you're either market driven or product/service driven. He pointed out that if you don't specialise in one of these, you end up in the middle of a line with "market specialist" at one end and "product/service" specialist at the other. And being in the middle means of course that you're probably trying to be all things to all people, which if nothing else is usually very hard work!

Now I now that sounds like a very long winded way of explaining something but my point is that now, when I work with my customers and we're strategic planning we look at these things first:

1. Who are their best customers? And we define them by writing a profile of a typical customer then.
   
2. What is it that those customers consistently come back to them for? (Often this is a particular service or specialism which is very easily missed until you go back and look).
3. Looking at what we discovered, what do they really specialise in? (product or service, or market).

Then we're ready to launch into our full stratgeic marketing plan. I have found this amazingly useful and in many ways more effective than starting with SWOT as it forces you to focus on the positive.

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

MarketingPlanWiz Available Now at the CIM

We're absolutely delighted that the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) is now offering MarketingPlanWiz in their Marketing Shop. You can see us here.

I took us a while to get it placed with them but now we think that their visitors have an excellent choice and a clear offer for small businesses who need an easy-to-use plan for day to day reference. We were talking about targeted marketing in our Marketing Tips this month and this is another case in point.

There's often enough room in your marketplace for more than one of you if you have a clear customer profile. In the case of MarketingPlanWiz it was developed with small businesses in mind and that is still the case. If we tried to sell this as a corporate marketing management product it wouldn't be right.

On the subject of niche marketing, it's interesting to read other views on customer behaviour during a recession. This article from the marketing magazine website on marketing myths in a recession explains how trying to predict what our customers will do is not always what you might expect...

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Are you tweeting for business yet?

It's very simple to do and at first seems a bit pointless! But the Twitter phenomenon has finally caught up with businesses. As social networks go, this one really is easy and as you've only got 140 characters to play with every time you post "what are you doing now?" - even we can manage it.

Interesting article in the Telegraph recently highlighting how we're using it as a cost effective communication tool and the amazing growth of Twitter in the UK.

Even if you don't use it to broadcast what you're up to, try following other people for a while to get a feel for what they're doing. A great way to see what the competition is up to or follow your favourite people. Stephen Fry is very popular...

Karen McNulty
MarketingPlanWiz

Technology for Marketing Show

Last week I managed to attend the Technology for Marketing show at Earl's Court in London. There were some challenging moments queuing for some of the seminars which were over-subscribed but the keynote speakers were excellent. Tim Faircliff from Reuters struck a chord when he described how one of their managers out in the field recently used Twitter to send the latest news report instead of their own newswire service! It just shows how the way we send and receive news is really changing. From a PR viewpoint it's great that we can do everything at speed but also frightening the number of media now available to use/follow and recommend to customers.

The other things that I took away with me were to watch out for more mobile applications, particularly using gps, like Google's Latitude and keep on eye on the new music social network spotify.

There's certainly no danger of anything standing still in marketing.

Karen McNulty
www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk

Discount for the New Year!

We couldn't start 2009 without our own January sale so we're offering a 10% discount on our marketing plans at MarketingPlanWiz, until the end of February. To use it, when you register or sign in, opt to buy your plan and enter the code in the discount box presented when you enter your payment details.

Here's the Code: MPLAN09

We think that's extreme value for money but as we're (sadly) passionate about planning, what else could we do?!

Happy Marketing Planning!

Karen McNulty
www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk