Business Networking Tips for Success

Hands up - who hates networking?

The very thought of meeting strangers and making small talk with people we don't know can send even "marketing people" running for the hills. But of all the marketing tools that I use, networking is still the one that often surprises me as the results can be quite amazing.

When I say "networking" I mean off-line for the moment. Online social networking is great, but it doesn't beat face-to-face relationship building, at least in the first instance. By all means continue business relationships online and meet lots of potential customers and suppliers, but it's invariably the people that you know that you build long term bonds with.

Traditional business networking involves either joining regular business networking groups, or attending events, launches, AGMs, training, exhibitions, trade fairs, even golf days. The networks that suit you will depend on who your target audiences are.

For example if you're selling to the general public, events, sponsorships, trade fairs or launches all offer the opportunity to network with potential customers. Sometimes, even business events will generate consumer opportunities as we're all consumers outside of our business lives.

I was at a business networking event recently with a fellow networker who was launching a perfume business and she was questioning whether a "business" network was appropriate as her customers were not other businesses. But when it boiled down to it, there were quite enough of the right target audience in the room who may need to buy gifts for wives and girlfriends and plenty of females who wanted to buy for themselves. People really do buy from people and this is another reason why business networking works even for B2C - and I did buy some perfume that day.

Often networking isn't just to find customers, but to find other businesses to collaborate with, contacts who may lead you to customers or simply to share the experience of being in business and find solutions together. I've met plenty of other marketers through meetings like this, many of who I've done business with at some point, even if only to refer other customers to them because they have a particular area of expertise.

There are some golden rules which are worth noting, but my best advice is to be yourself as far as possible. It doesn't work otherwise as you can't build long term relationships being somebody else.

Good networking tips are:

1. Always take business cards. This is strangely easy to forget, probably as we're dashing out of the door we forget to check (spoken from experience I'm embarrassed to admit), but without them people can't get in touch or follow up.
2. Prepare an elevator pitch, less than 1 minute if you can about what you do, and what's different about your business so that you differentiate yourself from everyone else. For example, if you're an Accountant, what can you add? I'm an Accountant who specialises in taxation, or who provides a small business package for a fixed sum. And what are the benefits to the product or service that you offer? So you don't have to worry about getting your self assessment in on time... This might take a bit of practice and it might change over time, but it's well worth doing.
3. Have objectives before you enter the room. Are you there because you want business leads, somebody to work alongside, a new supplier? Or maybe you just need to meet some like-minded people. The clearer you are the easier the process is.
   
4. After the event make sure you follow up if you promised to do something. This is often the best start to a long-term business relationship as if you deliver it builds trust.
5. Don't forget that you can network anywhere. You meet people at the shops, in restaurants and at events - they're all great opportunities to talk to people. Just remember that elevator pitch when somebody asks "what do you do?".

To continue networking after you've met somebody face to face, make sure your business card also has your twitter identity, LinkedIn address or other social networking contact details, as well as the usual email address, website address and telephone number.

For further inspiration, there are also some excellent articles about business networking on the Business Link website, worth a read.

Karen McNulty

MarketingPlanWiz and BusinessPlanWiz
www.twitter.com/karenmcnulty

Tips for Putting Together a Successful Marketing Campaign

It's not so different from putting together a marketing plan, but if you have a product launch, event or any big promotion and you've never prepared a marketing campaign before, it can seem a bit daunting. The principles are the same whether you're a small or large business and if you follow these guidelines you won't go far wrong.

The phrase "marketing campaign" implies big budgets but that's not necessarily the case. Before you start, decide what you can afford and what you're trying to achieve. Internet marketing opens up many more cost effective marketing channels so with a bit of planning you can control costs very easily, whilst still reaching a large audience. It helps to break campaign planning down into chunks, and this is how I recommend doing it:

1. Set objectives
Just as you would with any marketing plan, set your marketing objectives first. Campaigns usually require their own plans because you need to achieve a specific set of outcomes for identified products, services or events. An example would be a product launch. Customers may already recognise your brand but you need to bring this new product to the market. In this instance, objectives might include sales targets, PR coverage and some sort of call to action results such as coupons returned, telephone calls received or "sign-ups" for more information for example. Add a deadline so you know when the results need to be achieved by.

2. Define your marketing budget
It will help to decide which communication channels to use, from TV advertising or developing a viral marketing campaign through to email marketing and literature. Put a ceiling on what you can spend now to keep your campaign planning realistic.

3. Target audience
For this campaign, who are you targeting? Can you pin down a profile of the customer in terms of age, gender, social behaviour and/or location? Once you commit to this your marketing mix will become more obvious again. If you're not sure at this stage, some market research may be required.

4. The marketing mix
Which tools will you use to reach your target audience? Think as broadly as possible to start with, and have a look at this list for guidance:

• Outdoor media such as banners, posters, billboards and signs
  
• TV and radio
• Direct mail (printed) and distribution
• Flyers, leaflets, coupons
• Branded giveaways
• Exhibitions, shows and trade fairs
• Websites - yours and other peoples'. What needs to be updated, or may a new website for the campaign.
  
• PR - public relations activity such as press releases, sponsorship, talks, tours, announcements
• Blogs, podcasts and social media channels
• Advertising in print (newspapers, magazines) or online advertising (pay per click, banner advertising, affiliate advertising)
• Online viral campaigns (viral videos for YouTube, develop a game, an App or email campaign)
• Mobile marketing (Apps, games, mobile optimised websites)
  
• Stationery - does any need to to be updated to include the campaign, adding a tagline for example or flash message?
• Email signatures - adding a call to action or website link
• Campaign literature and online tools for distributors if you have them
  
• Email marketing
• Telemarketing
  
• Search engine optimisation for keyphrases associated with the campaign in all web based promotion
• Events and launches

That's by no means exhaustive but I find it really helps when you've got some ideas to look at. You'll probably know quickly in most cases which of these channels you would pick for your campaign and then you're on to the next stage:

5. Calls to action and creative
The heart of your campaign and hopefully what will make it a memorable one. Whether you're outsourcing to a creative agency or doing this yourself, settling on the core message to engage target audience that you've picked is critical. After all that hard work deciding what you're going to do, the content has to be right. The good news is that if you've pinned down the objectives and defined the target audience this becomes much easier. What would they respond to?

And finally...

6. Timetable and action plan.
You can create the best marketing campaign ever, but without some actions and deadlines you won't get the best results. Commit the campaign to a simple spreadsheet or table with headings for "what" needs doing "who" is going to do it (responsible individual or team) "budget" and "deadline". It's amazingly effective!

For some creative inspiration, there are some excellent case studies on the UTalkMarketing website illustrating successful marketing campaigns.


Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk and www.BusinessPlanWiz.com

Branding tips for your business on and off-line

Much of our marketing is online now and we're getting the hang of managing our brand across the Internet, or at least I'm sure we'd like to think so. The challenge is managing your brand on and offline, consistently.

Back to basics for a minute, what is a brand? It's not just a logo as we might commonly think but an identity such as a logo is certainly what links our brand to the outside world. What's more interesting is what happens when people see your logo as all of the associations they make with it really define your brand. These are things such as emotional response - what do you feel when you see the logo of a well known brand, such as Coca Cola for example? Chances are, when you think of and see this "brand" a succession of thoughts occur, based on what you believe their products and services to be, how you feel about them, quality and what you think they promise you as a customer. This is most likely based on past experience, and the general perception you have of the Coca Cola business ethos and service.

So the logo is the link or reminder to all of those things which makes it important, but perhaps not as important as the way you interact and associate with your customers and the outside world.

Assuming you have some sort of visual identity such as a logo and a corporate style, they still represent your brand and there are some golden rules on and offline for making sure that these are consistent.

Off-line. In many ways this is easier because you tend to have a lot of control:

• Make sure all stationery has your logo displayed in the correct way, using the right colours and fonts. Depending on how many of you there are, you may need written guidelines to keep this correct.
• Every touch-point with your organisation should be consistent, particularly your customer service
• Do you know where your brand is displayed? It pays to check that others are not using your identity as an endorsement or affiliation where you have not agreed such an arrangement. And where you do have an agreement, a responsible team member should check it's used properly.
• If you have social media pages such as on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, make sure their addresses (the urls) appear on your contact details, for example on your business card email signature.
  

Online, this can be more of a challenge as brand "mentions" are faster and potentially global. Using social media for business, such as Facebook and Twitter is great and means we can reach our target audience in more ways than before.

If you're not already, search these media to find out if anybody is talking about you or your business. You can usually search within the network, like Twitter Search or else set up a Google Alert. These are all free but well worth doing to make sure you're the first to know.

Communication is also now more often 2 way (also good) but there are a few golden rules:

• Your website is quite straightforward as you should have control over the copy and design, which will match your other offline marketing material
• Make sure you get there first! Create your own business pages so you have an official channel to respond to conversations about you as well as promote what you're doing. this is far easier to control and highlights that you're up-to-date and open as an organisation - all traits of marketing effectively on the Internet
  
• Social media, particularly if there is more than one person in your business benefits from a strategy and agreed style. As you expand or if you leave social networking to other members of the team, a social media policy may be appropriate. In fact, Mashable produced a great blog on just this topic last year, highlighting how Kodak, Intel and IBM manage their social media.
• What you do online will hang around far longer than anything offline. For this reason, it pays to communicate professionally at all times and remember that your working life is more likely to cross over with your personal social networking, as everything is searchable online. Well, not quite everything as we know there are privacy polices and security measures (particularly on social networking sites) - but how often is that in the news?!

Finally, we've put together some of our own golden rules for social media which you might also find useful.

Karen McNulty
MarketingPlanWiz and BusinessPlanWiz

Why your website is still your most important marketing tool

I train businesses on how to adopt internet marketing techniques (one of my other day jobs) and even I am surprised at just how much there is to cover. One of the sessions I regularly do is a 3 hour "introduction" to the topic and we only just have time to touch on all of the areas in those 3 hours. Both delegates and I finish that one looking slightly dazed!

But it doesn't matter how many of these new media you choose to get involved in, the truth is that unless you have a half decent website, there's not a lot of point. It's often missed that social networking is excellent for SEO for example - because it always links back to your website.

So, having delivered one of these training sessions recently it seemed like a good opportunity to reflect on what makes a good website. Whether you're starting out with a new site or know that you need to update what you already have, these tips might be useful for reference:

1. Navigation - both for search engines and visitors, it needs to be easy to find the right information on the site. Think of something huge like the BBC website and you really appreciate how important this is. The best way to get this right is start with creating a plan or site map of pages, taking case to think about a natural hierarchy and preferably no more than 3 clicks for visitors to find the page they want. Easier said than done, believe me!
2. Clear, easy to read text. Content is good for the visitor so they can find out as much about your products and services as possible, but also critical for search engines. Google for example, will check the title of the page (Page Title, I'll come to this in a minute) and then look at the content on the page to make sure it matches. It does this by identifying key words mentioned in your text. From a marketing viewpoint we all want clear text to read anyway so you should find someone to write for you if you're not sure where to start.
3. Look and feel. Despite everything being geared to the search engine "spider" these days, for most human visitors the design of the site is important. Colours should be friendly on the eye (and good for disability guidelines, good article on this here from webcredibility), and calls to action should be obvious. You can split test different web page designs even to see which one gets best results (try Google's website optimiser tool).
4. Basic Search engine optimisation. This is mostly looking at on page optimisation and checking that you have a relevant (but different for each page) Page Title, Description and Headings. Your website developer should know what these are if you're not familiar with them. If you have content management, so you can update your own pages (and you really should if you can), ask for access to these areas as you will need to do these for every new page you create or else have to ask your developer to do it each time.
   
5. Your website address. This is important, and if it's possible to use a url (the "www" address) with the relevant thing that you do in it, that's best. E.g MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk has "marketing plan" in the address. This all counts as "relevant" to Google who will check the address alongside the other things on the page we talked about.

There are lots of others things you can add (another blog probably), but these really are the essential components of a good website. Once you've done this, you're ready to dive into the world of social media, online PR and the rest... well your website is ready anyway!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Marketing lessons as BusinessPlanWiz launches in the UK

It's taken far longer than we expected - 2 and half years longer to be precise, but we're relieved to say that BusinessPlanWiz.com is now live. When we began with the concept of being able to create business plans and marketing plans online, it seemed quite straightforward. It still is really, certainly for the user, but developing software to do what's in your head is not for the faint hearted!

I shan't dwell on that one, because our website team (Edward Robertson) did work hard and the end result demonstrates their commitment to the project.

Anyway, as a marketer, and co-owner of a small business, it's been a fascinating journey and the new website has included all of the things we learned from launching MarketingPlanWiz 3 years ago. Internet marketing has steamed ahead during this time and this dictated the look and feel of the front end of the website, also our insistence that we could content manage as much as possible. These are a few of the more significant marketing approaches that we adopted:

• BusinessPlanWiz Video - you'll see it on our home page. We know now that Google loves video and the benefit of doing something on YouTube and embedding it means that it's found in 2 places - YouTube and on your website. I have to say that it was one of the hardest things we've done - have you tried talking to a camera about your business?! We could do this ourselves, making it a very cost effective medium. We used Camtasia to edit the video with screen shots and slides. Here are some good tips from UTalkMarketing about using video to optimise your website.
• Blogging is an integral part of the website. This time we had a business blog built into the site so that we could update blog type content quickly and easily, with links to articles on the home page making it nice and easy to find. Blog content is still excellent content for SEO as search engines like the fact that they're updated regularly.
  
• Making it easier to buy. We spent a lot of time with MarketingPlanWiz providing all of the reasons that buying was a good idea. With BusinessPlanWiz we let the product speak for itself. By making it free to try, it naturally makes the decision easier for users, so we removed extra pages that prevented people from getting to the buying page. From an e-commerce perspective, we learnt that this works more effectively.
• Google Analytics - we now set up goals so that we can quickly and easily measure specific activities on the website (such as buying) without having to work it out, as it reports automatically. Google's help for setting up goals in analytics is quite good.
• PR - definitely practicing what we preach here. We're working with a PR and marketing agency (Media Matters in Peterborough) which specialises in online PR and search engine content. Apart from saving us enormous amounts of time, their experience and media connections are excellent.

So we begin now with persuading people to link to us, another good thing for search engine optimisation, and because it really is a useful website!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Keeping Up-to-Date with Internet Marketing Trends

Marketing in many ways has been a pretty traditional subject for a long time. You learn about flyers, brochures, direct mail and PR quite early on in business and for a long time this type of activity was the mainstay of our marketing toolbox. Then "the web" arrived... and for a while websites were ok too as they were included in our list of marketing options - we just had to grapple with remembering to add our website address onto brochures, flyers, mail-shots and into our PR.

When it became clear that the Internet wasn't just about websites but using the technology to get traffic to them, we began a steep learning curve that has probably changed the way we think about marketing permanently.

Enter SEO (search engine optimisation), email marketing, social media and online advertising. There are days when I wonder if it can possibly change any more, as a seemingly unstoppable number of changes occur by the hour never mind the month or year as they used to. I'm not as old as I probably sound at this point (really) but it certainly keeps you on your toes. Thankfully I find Internet marketing absolutely fascinating, and along with others, get ridiculously excited about what the technology enables us to achieve as marketers. Just the ability to measure everything so accurately alone reinforces my belief that marketing works - the difference being now that I can prove it beyond doubt. Brilliant.

But - beware the perils of thinking you know it all. I attended the Internet Conference in Nottingham on Friday (#TIC10) to make sure I was up-to-date with Internet marketing developments. Of course I wasn't! I listened to Charles Arthur, Technology Editor at The Guardian, reminding us that the stats aren't all they're cracked up to be. He's right of course, the huge rise in smartphone traffic to access social networks like Twitter and Facebook has a big impact on the figures we think we're seeing. Susan Hallam continued with some really useful insights into the recent changes to Google Search, more than you think.... And then it was a good job I then went into a session with Dr Dave Chaffey, digging deep into Google Analytics and how to track traffic sources with much better segmentation than I had been.

It was a really useful day and although it was time out of my business, it will pay back by keeping me ahead of the latest marketing trends for my clients and our own websites at MarketingPlanWiz and soon BusinessPlanWiz.

It's worth taking a look at the presentation slides from the Internet Marketing Conference as they're full of useful points. I'm off next to the online marketing show in London in June where I'd quite like to discover that the Internet will soon be able to make dinner for me when I get home.

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Marketing Your Event

This is the time of year when there events start to be on all over the place (a lot outdoors if the British weather doesn't let us down) so we thought it was time we pulled together a few tips for marketing an event, as by their nature events are often one-off activities away from your mainstream marketing.

1. Business to Business events – where your delegates are other businesses. These often take the form of training, informing or networking and occasionally awards ceremonies or conferences. If this is your target audience here are our top tips:

1. Dig out existing customers' details so that you tell them first
2. Make sure you give people plenty of notice to get it in their diaries, we recommend at least one month in advance, preferably two.
3. Think of an innovative way to let your target audience know about the event – a quirky hand delivered invite or special voucher incentives for people to bring along with them work well. And email marketing makes it easy to send out invites while being able to track who opened the email and whether or not they clicked through to your website.
   
4. Don't miss all of the obvious opportunities to market your business event: On your website (do you have a news section?), on the bottom of your invoices; posters near or in your premises (if you have them) or at the venue where the event will be held (if you don't) and at any business networking that you do
5. Give them an irresistible reason to attend! Can you get a high profile guest speaker perhaps or offer expertise that's topical and cutting edge?
6. Make sure you've got a good reason to follow up afterwards, perhaps post your slides on Slideshare and sent out the url by email, or invite them to fill in a feedback form where they can indicate interest for your products or services.
7. If you video the event, post a snapshot on YouTube the next day. That way your event will still be found after it's all over - with a link back to your website.
8. Set up a "hashtag" on Twitter so people can track all mentions of your event and tweet using it as a reference. (More on hashtags at Twitter).
   

2. Consumer Events – marketing to the general public. These are often more fun as you can be more creative if you've got a budget. The reasons for events might be different but the principles are the same, so whether you're planning a festival in a local farmers field or an open evening in a shop, here are our top tips for success:

1. More “in your face” tends to be more effective – if you've got the budget for a celebrity that can work a treat to attract visitors, if you don't can you call in a favour or book an unusual act?
2. Promotion needs to be as public as you can make it but doesn't always have to be expensive– get in touch with the local newspapers, local radio stations, tourist offices, schools and libraries to see if you can post the details on their websites, in their outlets or even outside their premises.
3. Get some banners (as big as you can) made to publicise the date and time anywhere people will let you put one up. Try your local council for permission to use bridges and roundabouts, otherwise approach owners of buildings direct. Try a local printer for good prices for a batch of banners.
4. Create some instant PR with a good press release to local papers with headline information and top reasons to come to your event.
5. If you've got the budget, look at AA or RAC road signs up to a week before the event and while it's on. If you don't, get your own lamp-post signs made (you may need to check with the local council before you put them up)
6. Mention the event in all of your social networks, both personal and business, with a link back to your website.
7. Investigate local community websites that will let you post your event details on for free and take advantage of their website traffic.
   
8. Book a photographer and get some video footage if you can. This will be great for adding to your website afterwards and posting into your social networks.
   

Events are often fun to promote because you can use a few more techniques from your marketing toolbox than you might normally. The most important thing is usually to get bums on seats, so spreading the word as far as you can is the best thing you can do. The Internet makes that easier than ever, and if your event can go viral you might be surprised by the response!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk