Dumb Things Small Businesses Do
#4: Thinking It’s About You

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chihuahua in goggles
Remember my hapless entrepreneur from last week? He dug himself a giant scary financial hole because he was so in love with his vision of his product that he didn’t bother to get any feedback from actual customers.

In fact, he tended to think of his customers as an annoying necessity. They kept calling with their stupid support questions, keeping him from spending his time adding features no one had asked for.

They didn’t read the brochures he sent them. They didn’t use his Web page the way he thought they should. They didn’t order the product as soon as a salesperson called. The salespeople had to keep walking stupid prospects through all these dopey objections they had.

His prospects and customers were just incredibly inconvenient to his vision of what the company ought to be.

How do you feel when you’re treated as an inconvenience?

Ever been treated this way by a business? I have, probably hundreds of times. It never fails to make my blood boil.

I had a salesman in a car dealership lie to me once about having an add-on product in stock, because he didn’t want the hassle of going to dig the unwieldy item out of the store room.

I will walk twenty miles to work rather than ever buy another car from that dealership. And hmm, you know what? I have a better option than that. It’s called buying from one of their many competitors.

Even if you’re Apple, it’s not about you

I don’t care how cool or exciting your product is, it’s never about you. It’s about the customers who pay your salary and your employees’ salary.

I talk a lot about marketing being like a relationship, but there’s one key difference: it’s not supposed to be equal. You’re the one who has to be considerate, to anticipate the other’s needs, to always give more than you get, to listen 90% of the time and talk 10% of the time.

In a real relationship, you’d be a doormat.

In a business relationship, you’ll be a hero.

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Dumb Things Small Businesses Do
#3: Getting Upside Down

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A few years ago, I did some consulting for a business owner. We were throwing around some ideas for PR and word of mouth marketing. (I didn’t end up working with him, for a variety of reasons.)

He was dead sure he was creating the next Amazon. He’d built his product from scratch. He had some experience in the same business as his customers, and he believed he knew all of their needs inside and out.

Things were humming along reasonably well, but the business wasn’t the colossus he thought it deserved to be. So he took out a second mortgage on his house. He put another $40 or $50 grand on his credit cards. Then he borrowed some more money from a group of private investors.

He moved out of his basement and into a real office. He printed 10,000 four-color glossy brochures. He brought on a staff of salespeople to make cold calls.

He was glowingly confident all through this saga. After all, his product was groundbreaking. It was magnificent. It was his baby. With all this support, there was no way it wasn’t going to be a monster hit.

Alas, it turned out not, in fact, to be a monster hit.

He didn’t lose the business or his house, which is a miracle. If the timing had been different, he probably would have lost both. But he did saddle himself with a mountain of debt that was a lot larger than the actual worth of the business.

He’s fired everyone and moved back to his basement. If he works incredibly hard, he might someday sell the business and come close to breaking even.

Maybe.

Get tough with yourself

When you start playing with money that comes in as “capital” (as opposed to revenue you actually earn by selling stuff), it’s easy to get sloppy. You get more office than you need, more computer than you need, more fancypants furniture than you need. You keep salespeople who don’t sell, because it feels icky to fire people. And you spend hours on unnecessary trivia instead of figuring out how to put out the fire that’s consuming your business.

Sometimes, yes, borrowing money to expand is a good thing. But if you’re going to do that, you need a rock solid plan about how you’re going to make that money (and more) back.

“This thing is so awesome it just has to work” is not a solid plan.

You need to know your milestones (I need X sales at Y profit margin per month), and you need to devote your entire attention to hitting them.

If that sounds scary and awful, there’s another way to go about it

Start small. Make something (or provide a service) and sell that. See how it goes. Talk with customers and potential customers about what other stuff they would really like to see. Figure out what problems they have, and how you might solve them.

(And listen to their answers. That’s where my entrepreneurial friend went south. He was so sure he knew his customers better than they knew themselves. He didn’t spend any time actually listening to what they were telling him. It turns out they had a lot to say, loud and clear.)

Look at every new or improved product as a prototype. Build it, launch it, check your sales, tweak, and relaunch.

In fact, if you can build a simple version quickly, sell it before you build it. Create a discounted “pre-release” version and see how many people go for it. If your response is pitiful, dump the project before you start. Give your takers their money back with a little gift for their trouble.

If the new product isn’t bringing in additional profit, either in the form of more sales or better repeat and referral business, scrap the program. Move on to something else. Stay lean and light on your feet.

If you build based on real feedback (especially feedback in the form of customers actually taking action and buying something), you’ve got a much more stable foundation than your own vision.

Clouds are beautiful to dream about, but they’re darned chilly and uncomfortable to live in.

Tune in next time for Dumb Thing #4: Thinking It’s About You

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14 Must-Have Resources to Get Your
Small Business Off the Ground

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allen's hummingbird

The hardest thing about small business is getting started. In the past few weeks, I keep getting email from lovely people who want to launch a business, but they don’t know where to begin. They’re overwhelmed, confused, and in a lot of cases, pretty scared.

Since I’ve obsessively looked at dozens (maybe hundreds) of resources on just this topic, I thought I’d give you my suggestion for a beginners’ tool kit. These will give you at least 90% of what you need to know, without a lot of confusing junk you don’t need. And nearly all of these resources are cheap or free. (If the pennies are tight, don’t forget your public library!)

I’ve divided these into sections to keep you from getting lost in all the goodies! (So much for my idea about putting together shorter posts. You’ll get some more bite-sized ones later this week, I promise.)

Step-by-step systems

When you’re trying to sort through a zillion pieces of advice, it can be really, really helpful to have someone hold your hand and walk you through the steps in order. Here are two great systems for that. (You can absolutely use them together, too.)

1. New series at Ittybiz. If you’ve read Remarkable Communication for any length of time, you know that I think Naomi Dunford at Ittybiz is pretty much the queen of micro business advice. She’s coached lots of lucky clients into creating wildly successful, enjoyable home businesses. She doesn’t do much coaching any more (and if you can snag an hour of her time, it’s expensive), but she’s about to launch a free series on how to make a great living by creating your own Itty Business.

The series won’t be on her blog, but you can sign up for it here. (No worries, it’s going to be free.) It starts out with a post called Why We’re Broke and How to Fix It, with ideas about how you can get some of that “the rich get richer” mojo going for yourself.

2. Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid. Michael Port has an amazing step-by-step system for service professionals to . . .  well, book themselves solid.

Book Yourself Solid shows you which clients you’re meant to serve, what you can offer them that no one else can, and how to find customers without feeling like a creep or doing anything scary like cold calling.

One warning: reading the book will not make clients start calling you up. You have to actually do the exercises, which are fun but can take some serious thought.

I’m doing his exercises again now, as a matter of fact, because I’m going to be taking Remarkable Communication in some new directions. I like to bring the book and a notebook to bed and write out exercises until I get sleepy. It’s fun, it’s enlightening, and it works.

How to get good at (eeeek) marketing

3. Marketing basics. I created my free ten-part marketing tool kit to give marketing newbies an overview of the most important tactics and techniques. This would be a 70-part tool kit if I included everything, but it will get you rolling.

(Again, there’s nothing scary in there like cold calling or leaning high-pressure sales closing techniques. That stuff gives me the heebie-jeebies. I’m no damned good at it and thus do not try to teach it.)

4. Get started with copywriting #1. No one wants to study copywriting. It sounds hard and complicated, like English class but without the cute boy/girl who sat in front of you.

But you need to know that copywriting to promote your business isn’t the same thing at all as trying to write the Great American Novel. (Or even trying to get a decent grade on a term paper.)

Commercial copywriting is just learning how to talk about why people should do business with you. Gorgeous descriptions or perfect grammar aren’t necessary. Even if you think you’ll outsource all of your copywriting, it’s still important to know what goes into writing that sells, so you can give your freelancer good direction.

I hope it doesn’t sound too suck-uppy, but I refer to Brian Clark’s Copywriting 101 all the time. It’s sound, time-tested advice, it’s tailored to the realities of the 21st century, and it’s more convenient than a library of copywriting books.

5. Get started with copywriting #2. Gary Bencivenga is often called the most successful copywriter of all time. He wrote direct mail packages (you & I might instead use the term “junk mail”) that earned him millions of dollars (and hundreds of millions for his clients). He has a collection of tips called the Bencivenga Bullets that contain tons of of proven ideas for improving your copywriting.

I suggest you do as I have, and print out the entire collection of posts to keep as a reference. I read and reread these. Be sure to sign up for his email list as well, as he adds to the Bullets from time to time.

Learn from a pair of true Mad Men

In today’s world, blog posts or email autoresponders might take the place of ads, but the techniques work essentially the same way. These two are required reading if you want to understand what makes persuasive communication work.

6. Claude Hopkins already knew everything there was to know about advertising before you, your parents, or your grandparents were born. He wrote two books, My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising, both of which are readable and simple to understand, befitting a true ad man.

If you want to really learn the art of persuasive communication, it’s well worth rereading Scientific Advertising about every six months or so. You can get both books bundled together in a cheap reprint. Scientific Advertising is also widely available as a free PDF.

7. John Caples (rhymes with Naples) wrote about everything Claude Hopkins did, but Caples’s book Tested Advertising Methods is easier to understand and has many more examples. If you want to know the most important part of an ad, how to improve the selling power of your copy, what layouts and illustrations work best, or you like the sound of 35 proven formulas for writing headlines, Caples is your guy.

Master the art of influence

8. Robert Cialdini’s Influence is another cornerstone of persuasive communication. Cialdini is an academic who studied the techniques of con men and great salespeople. Influence describes dozens of experiments that get to the root of what makes effective sales and persuasion techniques work.

You absolutely must read and re-read Influence if you want to learn to sell, to market, or to persuade. It also comes in very handy for arming yourself against people who want to talk you into something that isn’t in your best interest. (In fact, that’s why Cialdini wrote it. He’s a self-confessed patsy who wanted to understand how to defend himself against master persuaders.)

Business stuff

9. The One Page Business Plan. I know I wrote about this last week, but it’s a very handy little resource. If you hate business plans (doesn’t everyone?), The One Page Business Plan will help you get to the good stuff without getting bogged down in spreadsheets until you want to jump out a window.

10. Small Time Operator. This nifty handbook covers all the other stuff. Taxes, accounting, hiring, vendors, DBAs, etc. etc. etc. If you have a question about running a small business, Small Time Operator can probably answer it for you. The only section that’s not as strong is the marketing one. I’d use the other resources here (especially Book Yourself Solid) for that.

A good-looking Web site that won’t cost a fortune

If one more person tells me they spent $10,000 on a Web site that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, I am going to lose my mind.

First things first: have your site built in self-hosted WordPress. (If you’re thinking to yourself, Well why not Joomla or Drupal, this section is too basic for you. Feel free to skip to #11 or #12.)

Yes, WordPress is blogging software, but it also works perfectly for regular old normal Web sites. (And you can add a blog in a snap if and when you ever feel like it.) As a businessperson, you’re going to want to add and edit new pages to your site, post articles, create reference lists, build special pages for promotions, and all kinds of things that are a holy pain in the backside if you do them in static HTML. (Never mind Flash and JavaScript and Ajax.)

If you’re somewhat technical, you can do this yourself, although you still want to get a real graphic designer to create the visuals that will give your site professional polish.

11. A terrific WordPress designer. Now there are lots of great WordPress people out there, but I’m just going to point you to one today. Men with Pens built this blog for me, and I really enjoyed working with them. Plus their prices are very reasonable. You may have your own person you love, and of course that’s cool too. But if you’re looking for someone, these guys do excellent work, they’re quick, and they really care about your success.

12. Remarkablogger. If a blog’s going to be part of your strategy, no one else will talk you through the business side of things like Michael Martine. Remarkablogger is all about how to use blogs as an effective tool to promote your business, rather than an end in themselves.

13. Thesis. Thesis is the WordPress theme this blog is built on. It’s especially user-friendly for people who aren’t exactly technical geniuses. It’s designed to be well optimized for SEO, and it’s easy to configure to look just the way you want.

There are lots of free WordPress themes out there, some of which can be configured to be truly fabulous. But I personally feel that going with a premium theme like Thesis takes things to a more professional level, without requiring a lot of technical or design expertise. totally up to you.

(One nice thing about WordPress is that you can swap out themes in minutes, so feel free to start with a free theme and upgrade if and when the time is right.)

What else?

14. Remarkable Communication. I’m here for you! This blog is all about creating more success for medium, small, and teeny tiny businesses.

You might start with the 7 Things Big Dumb Companies Do That You Can’t Afford and the 7 Dumb Things Small Businesses Do That You Can’t Afford.

If you like my approach, please subscribe (for free, of course) in either a reader or by email so you don’t miss any posts.

What’s your own favorite “getting started” resource? Let us know in the comments!

Flickr Creative Commons image by Kjunstorm

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Dumb Things Small Businesses Do:
#2: Failing to Make a Business Plan

by

chihuaha in a watering can

Don’t think I can’t see what you’re doing right now. You’re making that face you have, and muttering, “Ugh, crap, business plan. Can’t I just stab my eye with a fork and we’ll call it good?”

I am right there with you, my friend. But hear me out.

That long complicated thing the SBA calls a business plan? That’s not a business plan. That’s basically a job application for your bank. You might need that if you want someone to give you money (however, see #3 coming in a day or two), but you don’t need it to run your business.

On the other hand, as Michael Martine tweeted me last week, “The shit, meet wall; wall, meet shit plan only takes you so far.”

The so-simple-it’s-scary business plan:

  • Who’s my customer? (“Anyone with a pulse” is not a valid answer.)
  • What problem can I solve for them better than anyone else can?
  • Where can I go to find this kind of customer? Where do they hang out?
  • What products/services do I have today that I can sell them?
  • What products/services are they going to buy after they get product #1?
  • What additional products am I going to develop over the next six months? (Hint, give some serious thought to how you can create consistent recurring income, like with a membership, a club, or a subscription.)
  • How many customers x how much money = about how much I’m going to bring in every month. Take 75% of this number as a “reality check” figure.
  • How much will I need to spend every month? (No, you do not need a new Aeron or a new Macbook or a $10,000 Web site to start your business. Keep it to actual necessities, like your phone bill & postage.) Take 125% of this number as a reality check.
  • Do I have more cash coming in than going out? Cool, we’re good.
  • Do I have more cash going out than coming in? Not so good. Figure out the steps I can take to get the cashflow moving in the right direction, then take those steps.
  • Hoping like hell I will get more customers does not count as taking a step.

Now if you’re running a business of any size at all, you know there’s more to it than this. But if you know the answers to these questions and you keep making sure that for the most part, there are more dollars coming in than dollars going out, you’re going to do fine.

The reason most small businesses fail

In the words of a friend in a politically incorrect mood, “most small businesses fail because they’re run by dumbasses.”

It’s not actually about being dumb. It’s about letting yourself get fuzzy on one or several of these points. (Trust me, I know lots of supergeniuses who aren’t too good on those.) Get clear on all of them and your odds suddenly become quite fantastic.

If you want to get very slightly more formal (but still really quick and simple), check out the excellent book The One Page Business Plan. It boils things down to the essentials, and getting your ideas onto paper will do great things for your thinking.

In the next post we’re going to dive into really scary Dumb Thing #3, Getting Upside Down (without a good plan for getting right-side-up again).

7 Dumb Things Small Businesses Do

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7 Things Dumb Small Businesses Do That
You Can’t Afford (Especially Now)

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curious chihuaua

Last time we covered the painful, expensive mistakes made by Big Dumb Companies. That was fun, but the clever Michael Martine had the brilliant idea of talking about what small companies do that’s just as dumb.

Which saved me all the trouble of bending my brain to think of a post topic, so yay for Michael.

This week I’m going to try something new. Instead of giving you one post that’s zillions of screens long, I’m breaking the post up into more manageable chunks. We’ll see if you guys like it or freak out to get multiple posts a week from me. Let me know!

So today you get Dumb Thing #1:

Dumb Thing #1: Deciding you’re “Just Not Good” at marketing

I hear this all the time from solopreneurs. “I have the best handknitted dog sweaters/organic tattoo parlor/gourmet hair products in the city, there’s no one else coming close to putting out stuff as nice as mine. I’m getting some clients here and there, but you know, I’m just not good at marketing. I’m working 18 hours a day, so I figure it’s got to work out eventually.”

Do you tell the IRS “I’m just not good at bookkeeping”? (If you do, you might want to rethink that.)

Do you tell your vendors “I’m just not good at paying invoices”?

I can’t remember who I’m stealing this from, but if you’re going to decide it’s ok to give up on marketing, you might as well take all your working capital to Las Vegas and blow it on whatever combination of hookers and drugs that might appeal to you. It saves time, and the end result is the same.

It’s not rocket science

Business is about relationships and solving problems. Marketing is just communication about those things. If you have a working language center in your brain, you can get good at marketing.

A strongly related dumb thing is thinking you can turn the whole shebang over to an ad agency. (See: Crucial Facts Your Ad Agency Forgot to Mention). Agencies have useful resources, but they’ll never know your business or your customers like you do. And most agencies that handle small business are, frankly, terrible. (A few are amazing. But I’ve seen a lot of terrible.)

You need to know your marketing message so well it’s completely second nature. Know your unique selling proposition, know your benefits and your features, know your individual story, know your customers, know the media that make sense for those customers and that message.

Then and only then will you be ready to make good use of an agency. Until then (sorry), you have to get good at marketing.

Let us know in the comments what about marketing you just don’t think you can get good at! We’ll help.

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7 Things Big Dumb Companies Do That
You Can’t Afford (Especially Now)

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corporate

Not every big company is dumb. There are actually a decent number of big smart companies that do things we can learn from. But big, well-capitalized companies have a mortal enemy: inertia. It’s very hard to change the direction they’re already headed. It’s very hard to fix the cultural mistakes that have been ingrained in the company since its early days. It’s very hard for most big companies to learn.

So if you’re a small company (maybe even a company of one brave, stalwart soul), here are some ideas about how to outsmart and outmaneuver your big competitors. With the economy generally falling down around our ears, this is a great time to get a lot smarter. As Godin said, Small is the New Big. Use that to your advantage.

Here are 7 big-company mistakes not to make.

1. Printing 10,000 Brochures . . .

. . . and then having to dump 9,950 of them. This happens so often it would be funny–if it wasn’t your money getting flushed down the toilet.

Most small businesses don’t need a brochure at all. Brochures are typically “me-me-me” communications that talk about how great your business is. No one cares. They are inherently unremarkable. Brochures are created and printed to satisfy the ego of the business owner–and that’s a big dumb mistake you can’t afford.

If you want a physical piece to give your customers, assemble it more like a media kit. Have some nice-looking folders printed up, then create short inserts on different points of value for your customer.

Each insert needs to speak to something your customers give a damn about.

  • Print up some case studies that show the different kinds of customers you’ve helped.
  • Compile lists of great resources for your customers.
  • Create a buying guide for the type of product you offer. (Will that buying guide frame the question to suggest that you’re the best solution? Gee, ya think?)
  • Create white papers and how-to worksheets that let your customers solve important problems.
  • Offer a free educational series by email (like my marketing tool kit or email marketing class), then create an insert that tells customers how and why to subscribe.

Some of these inserts can be glossy, four-color jobs. That’s optional. Most will be simple black-and-white photocopies. They’ll be organized nicely in your folder, and you’ll include a business card and a personal, handwritten (not a computer handwritten font) note.

The contents of this folder must be intrinsically valuable to your customer. If you can’t imagine a customer tacking any individual insert to her bulletin board and referring to it daily, put some more work into it.

Every page of every insert will have your Web, phone and email contact information printed on it.

Your folders might cost as much to print as those brochures do, but now you have an infinitely flexible, configurable piece that allows you to start a meaningful relationship with that individual customer. Remember to take great care not to put anything on your printed folder (street address, phone number, hours, etc.) that has any chance of changing over the next 5 years. Instead, print that stuff on a professional-looking sticker that you attach neatly to the back.

2. Failing to Double-Opt In your Email Subscribers

Big companies figure they’re so special and their brand is so darned valuable that anyone dumb enough to email them is fair game for follow-up junk.

They can afford to throw away all that good will and email deliverablity. You can’t. Any autoresponder or newsletter-style email (as opposed, of course, to email sent by one individual to one individual) needs to be sent on a double opt-in basis. This means that your customer requests your stuff, then confirms that request.

Short-sighted email marketers think this leaves too many customers out, since invariably you lose a few people in that confirmation step. (For your reference, I lose about 2-3%.) Experienced email marketers know that a) if prospects don’t like and trust you enough to confirm an email subscription, they don’t like and trust you enough to buy your stuff, and b) deliverability on double opt-in email is much, much better, so more messages will end up in in-boxes rather than spam filters.

3. Assuming All Customers are White Guys

Executive management and boards of directors of big companies are mostly white guys. Now there’s nothing wrong with white guys, but when all decisions are being made by them, it gets easy to start thinking that all customers are white guys, too.

In many markets, most buying decisions are made by women or influenced by women. And the degree to which big dumb companies (unless they’re selling diapers or diet soda) just leave women out of the communication equation is genuinely shocking. Some big dumb companies do slightly better with the realization that a good chunk of the population is Latino, Asian or African-American, but there’s plenty of room for improvement there, too.

There are millions of customers out there who don’t look like the typical American corporate executive. Talk to those customers in a personal, relevant way. Respect them. And check your assumptions whenever possible.

4. Lawyering Up

Big companies have a lot to lose. They’re appealing targets for law suits of all kinds, from employment to consumer class action to environmental. They live in terror of pissing off their shareholders with bad publicity. They worry, legitimately, what the New York Times might have to say about their behavior.

They therefore play it safe. Now I won’t say this is stupid–it’s just a limitation that they have by virtue of being big. But it’s an expensive limitation.

Most big companies are very nervous about being straightforward with their customers. They don’t admit when they screw up. They don’t engage in the social media conversation. They don’t let customers post unmoderated feedback for everyone to see.

Big companies have armies of gatekeepers–lawyers, PR people, and the like–whose job it is to make sure the company doesn’t say anything remarkable.

When they do talk to the general public, they sound like . . . well, a big dumb company. They put forth mountains of irrelevant junk on spectacularly useless Web sites, and issue stiff, self-serving press releases no self-respecting reporter would spend more than 3.5 seconds reading. The only time they use conversational language is in TV ads–which most people Tivo past.

A big company has to hire “creatives” to talk to customers like human beings. You just need to be yourself. That’s a pretty significant advantage.

5. Forgetting that “We” Includes the Customer

Steve Yastrow recently had an interesting post on the Tom Peters blog about We relationships. He defined them as when your customer never thinks of you without thinking of both of you.

Pepsi, Microsoft and Nike have identities. They go around the world doing stuff that has nothing to do with us. When Microsoft says “we,” their customers don’t necessarily see themselves as included in that.

But when you think about your accountant, your real estate agent, and your hairdresser, you’re a pretty intimate part of that picture. Of course these people have lives that go on without you, but you don’t really think of them that way. As Steve put it, “When [your customer] can’t think of you without thinking of both of you, you have connected yourself to what she really cares about: herself.”

6. Valuing Systems over the Intangibles

Big companies can almost always make and distribute stuff more cheaply than you can. They get the best prices for raw materials. It’s relatively simple for them to outsource to whatever country is cheapest this month. They can essentially own entire distribution and promotion channels. It’s easy to think that the economies of scale will always make them more competitive than you can be.

But scale is the enemy of mystery. It’s the enemy of creativity. Scale needs robust, unchanging processes or it falls to pieces.

A few big companies include ingredients like delight, gratitude and enthusiasm in their processes. Most don’t. Your competitive advantage lies in the intangible, hard-to-quantify stuff that it would be hard to create a process around.

(Smart big companies do create processes around the intangibles. Fortunately for those of us in little companies, there aren’t too many of those.)

7. Making it Hard to Say ‘Thank You’

The Made to Stick boys had a good column about this in Fast Company this month. Big dumb companies (grudgingly) create ways for customers to complain and maybe get those complaints resolved. But they usually don’t have good mechanisms for customers to express delight.

One of the pleasures of any relationship is being able to express your appreciation. Most giant organizations don’t have good venues for their customers to talk about how much they love being customers. Which not only robs employees of the chance to feel loved, it also robs customers of the chance to feel wonderful by passing some of that love along.

Of course, appreciation needs to go both ways. Expressing your appreciation for your best-loved customers is something that takes a complicated system for most big companies to implement. (There’s that process thing again.) You can just send a warm, personal thank-you note. And maybe some cookies.

(If you subscribe to either of my free e-classes, I’m going to send an interesting idea you can use to send a compelling thank you to your customers–one that gets you a nice whoosh of business, as well as making your customers happy. If a whoosh of business + happy customers sounds good, get signed up today so you don’t miss it.)

How about you? Seen a big, dumb company mistake you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments.

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Linky Thursday, September 18, 2008

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b.schrade’s anemone & bee from Flickr Creative Commons

I haven’t done one of these in way too long. Here’s a collection of tasty links I’ve found that I think you will enjoy. I’m hoping to reach out more in the blog over the coming months, so look for more of these!

  • Naomi at Ittybiz has announced that she’s going to bring down her amazing Marketing School posts. Grab ‘em now while they’re still free. I have mine copied into a Word doc as my own do-it-yourself Marketing School ebook.
  • Joanna Young at Confident Writing has a fascinating post about how to handle a change in direction in your blog. When your audience (or customers) feel they have a real stake in what you do, you’ve won a battle–but taken on a whole new set of responsibilities.
  • Michael Martine at Remarkablogger is running a series called the Remarkablogger Manifesto to explore your core values as a communicator and a businessperson. The concepts all apply whether you have a blog or not–they’re really about examining what drives you and where you want to go next. This post has been my favorite, but they’re all very solid.
  • This video by the Grandmaster of Grump, Dan Kennedy, is part of a pitch for a new product of his. But I want you to pay special attention to his story about the chiropractor who let his family define him as “not too successful,” to the point of making it a moral issue. Kennedy would tell you that this kind of self-limitation is completely optional on your part, and I agree.
  • Chris Brogan’s epic post on 50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the Next Level has been bookmarked 689 times (so far) on Delicious, for good reason. He uses five different perspectives to look closely at what’s keeping you from moving forward, and how to break through. This is a much more thoughtful, meaty post than the usual linkbait list. Highly recommended.
  • Havi Brooks did a great series this week on “How to Annoy the People You Want to Help.” This was my favorite post, on speaking the language of the person you want to make a connection with.
  • If writing is torture for you, check out my Copyblogger post this week on growing a blog post. This is the system I use to write content, and I’ve really found it makes the process less painful and more productive. Hope you find it useful!
Filed Under: eclectic, resources, small business Tagged With: , , , , , ,

How Tasty Are Your Chips and Salsa?

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chips and salsa

One of the great things about going out for Mexican food is getting that free chips and salsa. Of course, it isn’t really free. The cost gets folded into the price you pay for your carnitas tacos or the killer chicken enchiladas. But it feels like a great free gift, which is part of what makes it so enjoyable.

Good content marketing uses free content in the same way. Really great free content whets the appetite and it shows off your talent at creating something tasty. Whatever your regular “main course” product is, a nice appetizer of chips and salsa can strengthen your relationships and boost your business.

Chips and Salsa Get You Ready for the Meal

Have you ever been ravenously hungry, but you didn’t quite realize it until you put the first bite into your mouth?

When you start out with some chips and salsa, you get your tastebuds in the mood for a great dinner. You get started down a path and realize you want to keep going. A few bites of something really yummy leave you primed to enjoy the full meal that’s to come.

In the same way, free content like email newsletters, blogs and autoresponder content are tasty appetizers that make your prospects hungry for something more substantial. They create an enjoyable early experience of consuming your stuff, and set up the right conditions for a great, enduring relationship.

Great Salsa Shows a Great Cook

Salsa isn’t actually very hard to make. You chop up some decent ingredients, put them together in the right ratios, and there you have it, delicious salsa.

But customers don’t know that. The assumption is that if the free salsa is out of this world, the paid main course will be even better. Free salsa is a relatively inexpensive, low-work way to make a great impression on the customer and sell her on the exceptional quality of the main course.

A great email autoresponder works the same way. When you deliver knockout content for free, your reader can’t help but ask herself, “If this is the free stuff, how amazing is the paid product going to be?”

To make free content work, be smart about it. Use the salsa model: create a PDF, an autoresponder, or another vehicle that doesn’t cost too much money or work to send out. Save free consultations, physical samples and other more expensive or labor-intensive freebies for later-stage prospects.

Salsa-and-chips content should, like their namesake, be zesty and not too filling. You want to tease the appetite, not satiate it. Which leads us to . . .

Don’t Wait Too Long to Serve the Meal

If you fill up on chips and salsa while you wait 40 minutes for the meal, what happens? Your needs have already been met. You aren’t hungry any more. You don’t devour your delicious dinner, your experience isn’t completely satisfying, and you’re not as likely to come back.

If you have something to sell, try to make an offer quickly after you put the chips and salsa on the table. You can literally offer a paid product right on the page that thanks your reader for confirming her email subscription. Or you may want to put an offer in your first message, along with that valuable chips-and-salsa content that’s got your reader’s appetite going.

If you deliver nothing but free chips and salsa for months on end, you run the risk of training your customers to expect that everything you offer will be free. Those customers can still build your business—a cheapskate who raves about you all over town is well worth cultivating—but obviously it’s better business to get as many customers as possible paying their way.

Hungry For More?

I have not one but two free and tasty e-classes, delivered fresh and delicious straight to your email box. Sign up today!

And if you like this post, please share it with your friends by linking to or Stumbling it!

Filed Under: copywriting, email, marketing, small business Tagged With: , ,

Relationship Marketing Series #6, Connect With One Person

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young-women

Even though (with any luck) you’re marketing to lots and lots of people, no one wants to be a faceless speck in a crowd.

Maybe it’s a result of the industrial age. Yes, we like to be in tribes, but tribes are small, intimate things. A tribe might be 8 people or 80, but it’s not 80,000. The greater the scale we have to deal with in our jobs, our commutes, our grocery stores, or even our churches, the more we look for one-to-one relationships.

We’re born alone. (Even twins can’t manage that one side-by-side.) And we all secretly think we have problems that no one else has. We want someone who really gets us. Someone who speaks to us, and just to us. Someone who listens to our problems and fears, and then makes those go away.

Know Who You’re Talking To

Marketing 101 tells you to know your market. Too many marketers confuse that with demographics. “My customers are married women 26-40 with one or two children, who subscribe to Redbook and Parenting, and carry a MasterCard.”

Demographics are collections of traits. They come in real handy if you’re buying a mailing list or deciding where to advertise, but demographics aren’t people. They’re just a collection of patterns.

If you have something to sell to that demographic, you need to be thinking about Cynthia (who hates to be called Cindy), who’s 33 and a little bored at work, has a four-year-old named Ben and a six-year-old named Ruby, reads Parenting even though it makes her feel guilty and her mom got her a subscription to Redbook but all she reads are the dessert recipes and articles about dieting, and yes she knows that makes no sense but she does it anyway, and yeah she has a MasterCard, because she got mad at the bank that issued her Visa so she cut it up.

Talk to One Person

Whether you’re writing a blog or an email newsletter or a set of postcards or a yellow pages ad, you need to be thinking about Cynthia.

What can you help her out with? Why is your stuff the perfect match for her problems? Does your gym offer really great childcare, so she doesn’t feel like a rat for parking her kids there for an hour? Does your product respect the fact that she’s pulled in 20 directions as a working mother, and help clarify her choices so she can focus on what she needs to do? Does your carpet-cleaning service use nontoxic solvents, so she can quit worrying about poisoning her kids and the dog just so her mother-in-law will quit making that face when she comes over?

What’s not working for Cynthia right now? How can you make that work better?

To get started on that conversation, I found a nice resource on a copywriters’ forum [note: now moved to Michel Fortin's blog, the link's been updated] called the 60-minute naked truth sales letter. Even if you never intend to use any kind of sales letter, the things you’ll discover with this exercise will help you find the right messages for Cynthia. You’ll get a good, high-level grasp on what you really need to let her know about.

How Do You Find Cynthia?

You’ll be able to find Cynthia by paying attention.

First, make sure Cynthia loves your stuff. She’s your perfect customer. She’ll buy anything and everything you have, because your solutions line up exactly with her problems.

If you realized you’ve imagined a Cynthia who’s just not that into you, start from scratch. Your Cynthia needs to be the person who loves what you do and how you do it, can afford your products and services, and is someone you can figure out how to reach. (In other words, you could buy a mailing list of Cynthias, or you can find a joint venture partner who’s got an email list of Cynthias.)

Talk to the customers you have, especially the ones who love you. (You also want to pay close attention to the ones who hate you, but that’s another exercise.) What’s going on with them? What’s freaking them out right now? How do they feel about the economic situation? What’s going on in their personal relationships? Is this election a big deal for them? Do they think it’s going to change things, and if so, is that good or bad, from their point of view?

If you’ve got a bricks and mortar operation, spend a lot of time on the floor hanging out with customers. Watch them. Listen to them talk to one another. Ask them questions.

If you’re online, go to forums where your customers hang out, and listen to what they gripe about. Set up Google alerts about the kinds of problems you solve. Send out surveys, to both existing customers and potential customers.

Make it very easy to give you feedback, and pay close attention. Look for patterns. Try to figure out the underlying problems and worries that are beneath people’s words.

Speak Her Language

One great thing about all this paying attention is that it lets you discover the language of your customers. Maybe they talk like Katharine Hepburn, and maybe they talk like Roseanne Barr. You’ve got to listen before you can find that out.

Use the phrases, metaphors and examples that your customers use. Describe their problems the way they do. When they give you testimonials, don’t clean up little grammar errors or odd turns of phrase. Keep as much of the original language as you can. A little imperfection shows that it’s real.

Obviously, to make this work, you have to get to a point where that language is natural to you. Parody makes for lousy advertising. If you’re Roseanne and your customer is Katharine, find someone who’s more like your customer to read through your stuff and help with the tone. You can’t make a real connection in a language that’s utterly foreign to you.

One giant advantage you have over Coca-Cola or Johnson & Johnson is that you can create a true sense of personal connection with your customers. Not every customer wants that, but you can find the ones who do.

The worst mistake small-business marketers make is thinking their market is anyone with a pulse. Find your Cynthia, and just write for her. (Even the non-Cynthias will respond to this, because your tone will be personal and genuinely friendly.) Have a cup of coffee with Cynthia when you sit down to write a blog post or an email newsletter article. Let her know what you can help her with today.

When you spend your time thinking about what else you could be doing to make Cynthia’s life better, you’ll start to see some very exciting things happen in your marketing.

So who’s your Cynthia? Let us know in the comments . . .

The Relationship Marketing Series

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Flickr Creative Commons image by geeknerd99

Filed Under: connection, copywriting, marketing, small business Tagged With:
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