Häkk Blog

Wow! I’ve done exactly what I tell my clients not to do. I abandoned my commitment to our blog. And I have plenty of reasons: big projects for clients (which included blogs, so I was blogging), family and motherhood.

Nevertheless, I should be getting back to our beloved Häkk blog after a two and a half month hiatus. “Do as I say. Not as I do.” Yes, I am a hypocrite.

I’m making a pact right now that I’m going to have to decrease frequency of our blogs, however, I’m recommitting to what I do and that’s providing thoughtful insight on how to maximize online to build your business. So here are my top ten things you have to do commit to in order to harness online marketing strategies for building your business.

1. Be Committed – You’ve never had an opportunity in your life to reach prospects and customers daily, nor this economically. However, it’s not free. It requires your time, intelligence and voice on a regular basis.
2. Be Connected – Follow your industry, competition, and customers. Learn how to be a voyeur and listener. There’s never been an opportunity to witness commentary, conversation and expression from your marketplace. You’ll learn a lot and it will give inspiration to your product/service development, customer service and sales/marketing.
3. Be Communicative – If you want to be a leader in your business, you have to be an effective communicator.  Even if you hire someone to write your blogs and social media posts, make sure it conveys your thoughts and carries through in everything you and your employees say to your marketplace, customers and community.
4. Be Authentic – Don’t let your online marketing become a hard sell or self-serving, you’ll lose them before “Hello.” I heard a great saying a few months back, “The ABC – Always Be Closing is changed to Always Be Consulting.” Customers have multiple choices and if you are not focused on their needs, they smell it a mile away.
5. Be Creative – Your opportunity is to connect with your customers daily. You have to think outside of the box at times and get beyond your sales goals and think about your customer. For example, “You have a serious product, then figure out how to be funny…make fun of yourself.”  or “Become a community supporter, sponsor, and educator and rally your customers to join in.”
6. Be Customer-Focused – Get in your customer’s head about their problems and needs for solutions. Because they are not looking to spend their money on your product or service, they are looking for a solution.
7. Be Courteous – You have a sales quota and it’s not being met. Posting out ten more Facebook news posts or sending an email every other day with the same message is not going to drive them to pick up the phone, they are going to hit “unsubscribe” and “unlike.”
8. Be Strategic – Think about overall goals, then focus on your entire sales cycle in regards to your customer’s needs and decision-making process. You’ll discover there are multiple messages and tactics that drive them to order.
9. Be Rewarding – Reward your loyal followers/subscribers. They’ve committed to you, then commit back to them with special offers and gifts because they are your referral engine and lifeline to incremental sales and growth.
10. Be a Measuring Stick – At the end of the day, you better have some ways you are measuring how your business is growing with all your time/commitment with online marketing. Online is the easiest medium to measure.

You have to BE a lot of things, but in the end they convey so much to your customer and they deliver the results – sales and growth. Let’s all rally together and be the champs we can be! Call me Coach Michaels! I’m even typing harder and louder. I need to sit down. Oh, that’s right. I am sitting down.

Again, I apologize for the hiatus. It’s out of my nature, so I’m back in the jungle again!

I recently sat in a brainstorming session with a consortium of businesses trying to set up a series of educational seminars for women. The idea was based on a similar program that targeted elderly people.  It had been very successful in bringing in qualified leads for these businesses.

As we talking about marketing approaches and ideas, one of the members said, “Why don’t we keep this simple and take the same approach they did: newspaper ad and flyer postings in local libraries.” That’s when I realized that the last thing people often think about is their potential audience. We are ready to throw down some tactics and go!

When you really sit down and think about it, how many women who are in turmoil and at a crossroad in their life are reading the newspaper or scanning the library bulletin board? Let me answer that for you – not many, if any at all.

Without taking the time to understand the demographics and psychographics of your target market, how on earth can you create a compelling message and strategy that delivers result? And while you might be saying your customer is a highly intrinsic part of you, are the facts written down and profiled for you to measure your ideas against? And often this is what happens, companies get wrapped in themselves and not the customer, they lose sight and deliver campaigns that result in little impact or reach.

Demographics

The first step of your research is finding the demographics of the region that you plan to target. You’ll want to know the population’s makeup in terms of age, gender, income level, occupation, education, and family circumstances: married with children, singles, or retired.

To find that information, there are a variety of resources online – US Census, government web sites like cities and states, local chambers and economic development committee and most recent edition of the Country and City Data Book, published by the U.S. Department of Commerce. This research will give you the most recent census data on the area you wish to target.

Geographic and Lifestyle Factors

Give some thought to where and how your target customers live. Are they ecologically minded young professionals who base their purchasing decisions on how products are made and packaged or a suburban soccer mom who spends most of her time chauffeuring her children, sitting on the PTA board and housework? What is the weather like? Are people more likely to spend a lot of time outdoors, or are indoor activities more popular? Are these people conservative with their money, or are they spenders? The answers will help determine what you can sell to them, how you should sell it, and at what price.
Customer Needs

Consider all of the reasons why people might purchase your product or service. For example, if you’re starting a personal trainer business, what are the priorities of your clients? Do they want to get in shape because they just went through a terrible divorce and are getting back in the dating scene? Or found out they are on the brink of contracting diabetes or having a heart attack? What’s their fitness history? Are they looking for more than just fitness – nutrition, beauty, therapy? Do they want to train in a private setting or are they comfortable in a busy YMCA? If you go through this exercise, you start to realize there is a variety of people you could be targeting and the messages and strategies will differ based on their needs.

Find out by talking to people in the local fitness industry and by quizzing friends or acquaintances who have trainers or have hired trainers in the past. Then you can design and market your business accordingly.

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Transparency and Leakiness Can Be Scary.

How Do You Conquer that Fear?

As online marketing continues to evolve and every company is battling on being a leading expert, the question remains, “I fear giving away too much.” The movement of today’s marketing is not selling, but consulting. So it’s giving away some of the secret sauce.
Now you’re probably saying, “I worked hard to make my secret sauce! And I’m not about to broadcast the recipe to the world!”

And that’s a valid fear and you don’t have to share the recipe.

You have to find a balance on what you are willing to give away to get someone to opt in, engage and then ultimately buy. For most of us, there are multiple levels to the selling process, you have to figure out how to share and not give away the farm.

One thing to remember is that most of us do not offer some totally unique product/service you can’t get anywhere else or something so complex like rocket science. We outsource because we lack the time and resource. It’s not always the intelligence. Give a little intelligence and use it to your advantage.

Here are some things to consider regarding your levels of content sharing.

• Philosophy – Show your passion and how you got here. Get on their level of frustration to educate them on the marketplace and then differentiate yourself from the competition.
• Educate Your Features – Take your bullet point features list and break them down into educational presentation, seminars and white papers. It’s a huge opportunity to branch out the complexities of what you offer and educate on how important they are and the need for the right resources/experts.

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Are you still emailing? Well, then email is not dead.

What happened last week with Ben & Jerry’s decision to drop email campaigns as part of their marketing strategy is an interesting turn of events in marketing.  Not because there’s going to a monumental shift in online marketing and email is out, but rather it’s an indication of companies streamlining strategies based on listening to their customers. Ben & Jerry’s found out how their customers wanted to get information from the company and it’s through social media.

Even though we don’t know the details of Ben & Jerry’s social media plan, I can guarantee that their plan only includes a handful of networks. They will not be investing in every social network on god’s green earth, but focus on key networks their customers/prospects follow. In addition to knowing how their customers want to be communicated, they also have a geographical map of their customer’s presence in social media along with a psychological profile of their values and viewpoints in social media. Wow! That’s some powerful data they have.

And there’s no reason you can’t have this information too. Research is the key and it’s not about hiring an expensive market research company when you don’t have the budget. There are some very basic things you can do to harness similar knowledge.

• Survey Your Customer Base – There are numerous free and cost effective online survey tools available to ask some questions about how they want to be communicated and what kind of information they are looking for. However, take the time to set your goals/objectives of the survey before developing the questions.

• Survey Your Industry, Colleagues and Prospects – You don’t have a qualified number of customers or representative sample from your customer survey? Reach out to your prospects and ask them what they are looking for from a company like you and how they like to be communicated to. In addition, you will get some interesting insight as to why they might not currently do business with you.  One more thing to consider is incentives for participation in your surveys, so you will get more responses (i.e. special discounts for services/products, white paper, gift or cash prize, etc.).

• Focus Groups – If you have more time and money to invest and want to get further insight into the statistical results of the survey , bring a panel into discuss how they use online to educate and make purchasing decisions. Make sure the group is representative of your customer’s demographics and/or industries you serve.

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B2B and B2C are really not that different. A business is comprised of people. And guess what? That makes them consumers. They are just spending the company’s money, not their personal bank account.

Now that you realized that you are talking to a person, why would you think your B2B approach is so vastly different than B2C?  While they have a responsibility to purchase goods/services to save their company money, time and resources, develop sales leads, close sales, etc. we as consumers have the same needs.  We want to save money, we want to make our lives easier, we want to be more attractive, etc.

Businesses are run by emotional beings that have personal standards which are derivative of their work ethic and decision-making.  For some people, their job is their life. This might be a family business or even a professional that has dedicated their life to their company and/or career, so get personal. They certainly take what they do personally. You have a huge opportunity to make an impact and cut through the competitive clutter.

1. Make sure you know who your customer is, and go out and find them online.
2. Observe the conversation.
3. Craft your message.
4. Share your message.
5. Join the conversation and implement it in your marketing/operations.

Who’s figured this out?

American Express Business Credit Services

Home Page of Open Forum

Created their own social media platform, www.openforum.com, where small business members and experts could exchange advice, post events and have an open dialogue with one another. Their message was simple – “A community designed to help you grow your business.” By having a basic message that showcased people and not a business with challenges, they created a community to join vs. signing up for a credit card.  And it has become a no brainer for a business to set up an account because they are gaining much more than a credit account.  By developing a social platform with a personal message, OpenForum.com passed 1 million monthly unique visitors for the first time in March 2010.

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