Ben Arment (see his blog here) poses an interesting perspective: you can’t take a mediocre idea and make it viral, no matter how much marketing ‘savvy’ you have. Ben suggests that instead of focusing on the mission and ideology of what you are offering, just for a moment focus on this: is the idea of your offering a good idea or a bad idea for the community that is your target market? Could it be that you are answering questions nobody is asking?

Now, I don’t know about you, but this strikes a real chord with me.

I’m not suggesting for one minute that at the first sign of things not happening (if that makes any sense!) you junk your ideas and decide you are anwering the wrong questions – but at least consider the possibility sooner than you might have in the past…

So my call to action is simple: get clear, if you aren’t already, about the questions your community or target market are asking. What could you do to answer these questions in a more useful and accessible way for your community?

And just as I sign off, this last question emerges from the fog: are you even clear enough about who your community or target market is? (I think my next blog will be about identifying your target market!)

To your success!

Cheers

Martin

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Terri Murphy has this amazingly effective approach to crafting an elevator speech. Learn more about her at the iLearningGlobal blog.

An elevator speech is a brief description of what you do and who you do it for – like a personal commercial. It’s a key part of any marketing strategy – you should have one!

According to Terri, most people state what they do but don’t describe how they help their customers improve the quality of their businesses or their lives.

They don’t even mention how they add value or include any benefits.

And most importantly, they don’t make the other person want to continue the conversation.

If you can keep the conversation going then you are on your way to building and strengthening a relationship that can lead to doing more business in the future.

How do you craft a great elevator speech?

Terri suggests that it be brief – ideally 7-9 seconds, though it can be as long as 15-30 seconds. The idea is you can share it with somebody in an elevator during a short ride.

The shorter the message, the easier it is to remember, and to say it smoothly, clearly and with conviction and passion. Being short, every word counts, so crafting it well really is critical! The easiest way to get started is to know there are a few simple steps involved, and to start at step 1!

• Step #1 is to write down all the services you provide your customers. Think about how you help them save time, money & improve productivity, for example.
• Step #2 brainstorm why people choose to do business with you – why customers want to continue to do business with you and what you do to make them raving fans. Sure, there’s plenty of people who can provide what you do – so why YOU and not them?
• Step #3 write out what you do in such a way that it encourages more conversation. Instead of saying “I sell real estate” say “I specialise in helping people get the most for their money when they buy or sell real estate.”
• Step #4 Break the statement down. First say what you do and then describe how the customer derives benefits from working with you.
• Step #5 Write out your actual elevator speech. It needs to become you, easily and spontaneously delivered, easily understood.
• Step #6 Practice – lots!!

Once you are happy with it – use it! These tips from Terri can help:

Having delivered your elevator speech your very next step is to advance the relationship by asking Qs about what they do, about what’s going on for them. And then follow up with this powerful script:

Mr X, it’s been delightful meeting you. I’d like to see if I know anybody in my database that could be a good prospect for your business. How can I best refer you?

This last sentence alone will make you standout, and allow you to discover what their wants & needs really are so you can see if they’re a good fit for you. And follow up – if you ay You’ll do something, do it. After a meeting etc follow up with a personal note so you can help them remember you and the event – making it easier for you when you call.

How is you elevator speech? Are you really happy with it?

Call to action: use Terri’s 6 step process and advice to recraft your elevator speech. Why not share it here? I’d love to read them!

Terri has made a short (<15 minute) video of all of this, with some great examples. Find it on http://www.ilearningglobal.tv/

(Surf over there, click on the Video Theatre Launch button coloured blue, on the right hand side. You may have to download & install a video player – it only takes a few seconds, then select Category Channels on the right and then Sample Category Videos – the player will open, then select the PLAYLIST icon on its bottom right, and choose Terri’s video – simple!)

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Is it in the list? Some say “asbolutely!”

Others say “are you kidding? It’s not in the list!”

So who’s right, and who’s wrong?

Well, I reckon both sides may have a point….

What I actually believe is simple – the money IS in the list…. IF IT IS THE RIGHT LIST!!!

What does it mean to have the right list?

Well, the right list will have a high conversion rate – for every visitor, a higher proportion of them will convert to a sale.

The right list will also have higher efficiency – some say that before the average sale, the customer must be exposed to your sales message as much as 7 times. The right list could do this in 1 or at most 2 ‘exposures’ (sounds a little rude lol).

The right list can be much smaller than many other lists and still give you superior sales performance.

How is this all possible?

It’s possible because the people on this list are very clear about what they need, what you offer, and basically they also LIKE YOU!!! It’s a relationship thing.

There are 2 ways to build a list..

1. Entice any old punter in, use all manner of freebie giveaways – if there is little risk to the freebie, people will grab it “in case it comes in handy later…” – I know I do this sometimes – it’s part of my market research…
2. Be so clear about what you offer that those people who are in the market for what you have or something very like it, will come to you readily, and everybody else will stay away.

Some of you might be thinking there’s a third way, where you are being very natural, honest & sincere, and that attracts people to you as well. I agree, AND I would want people attracted to me BECAUSE they like me AND want/need/are very interested in what I am offering, so for me that puts this personal liking & connection element firmly back in to the second way to build a list. But that’s just me…!

Let’s start with a useful question. I like this one, and I think you will too..

Why do you even need a list? Why does anybody?

Well, if you want to upsell, cross sell or do any other selling in the future, it’s far better to pitch to people who’ve already put their hands up (thanks to Bernadette Doyle of www.clientmagnets.com for this turn of phrase!). To do this you need to know who these people are – and in my book that will be a list… capiche?!

But as I alluded to before, it’s not size that matters so much as quality – the quality of your list.

So why not turn your energies to building quality connections, to really understand the needs of your market and individual customers? Look at concepts such as Critical To Customer or CTC trees and the Kano map, both from the field of quality & performance improvement, in particular, Six Sigma (find more on both at www.isixsigma.com free, with no signup needed…)

I had a much better experience & growth on twitter when I stopped trying to get as many people to follow me and started focusing on conversations with individuals.

The ‘downside’ is it all takes time – 30 mins a day is unlikely to be anywhere near enough…. The ‘upside’ – some wonderful relationships with great people, fun, and actually, some cracking good referrals and recommendations…

Try it – it doesn’t cost anything!

Cheers

Martin

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It eloquently and succinctly describes the new paradigm that Web 2.0 and social media represent to the PR and advertising/marketing industries.

So many organisations simply don’t get it – they will though – they’ll have to. If you work for a big corporate, you may find your next VP of Marketing is a ’spotty youth under 20 who lives & breathes social media…’ (!).

To put it crudely – the old PR way, where you seek to control the conversation & message is out – you cannot control anything. All you can do is influence it. I recently was telling a good friend of mine who’s spent her entire working life in PR/marketing and is fast approaching 60 yrs old (and moved in quite high places) about Web 2.0 and social media marketing. Her response was interesting: “We’ll just not go to social media marketing then, if we can’t control the message”.

I told her simply – “You have no choice – whether you join in or not, people will talk about the company, its products, services, and what it seems to truly stand for. If you aren’t there to influence the message, your competitors might be, and do you want them influencing the message about you, in your absence?”

She knows this is the future, but as she said, it’s hard to turn the clock back on nearly 4 decades of fighting to be in control…

We live in interesting times!

Judge for yourself, read the blog entry I mentioned, here.

Cheers

Martin

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… questions that are answered by some of the Industry’s most successful marketers and business people.

You can find out more by taking a look at this video here.

I recommend you remove any distractions and give it your full attention for the next 15-20 minutes.

For those of you wondering about Tahir’s wonderful accent, he hails from the north of England – magic!

Get on over to www.easilyanswered.com to learn more.

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There are just 5 types of email that you will ever send in a marketing campaign:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Conversion
• Product Usage
• Loyalty

You choose which type of email to send once you have decided why you are sending a customer/prospect an email.

Awareness – this is mostly about creating brand awareness – where either you, your company name or a product/service is the brand in question. You simply want the market to know you exist. Do not expect to close a sale from this kind of email – the intent will be to have the reader engage further with you, your company or the target product/service – for example requesting further information. You may want to consider 3-7 emails at this level to make sure enough awareness has built.

Consideration – this kind of email contains some element of education that moves the reader to taking action to try or buy what you are offering. You’ll be laying some groundwork here, for example, reminding the reader about some particular problem or dream they’re grappling at the moment, and having the reader associate this with you, your company and/or your target product/service. You’ll begin the process of building your credibility in the mind of the reader.

Conversion – the most common form of marketing email a person receives – these are your standard ‘buy it now’ and ‘sign up today’ emails we’re all familiar with. These work well when you send them at the right time – when the reader is in the right mood to buy or sign up. Send them at any other time and they are worse than useless – they tarnish your image… Sound familiar…? Send them when you effectively get a ‘buy’ signal from the reader. Buy signals will vary hugely from situation to situation, and this is where some kind of autoresponder can help, enabling the reader to ‘pull’ the next piece of the sequence in…

Product Usage – After the sale has been made many marketers get lazy, stop working or pass the responsibility on elsewhere – avoid this trap! A great example is with amazon – you buy a book for example (I buy lots of books – you can never spend enough on your education…) – immediately you get a confirmation email that also suggests other similar titles that people like you have bought in the past (students of the influence guru Robert Cialdini will recognise this – if you’re not a student of Cialdini, drop me a line and I’ll send you an overview) About a week later/after the delivery you get a follow up, asking you to rate the experience, and more titles are suggested… The point is, after they buy, they will use, and they will talk about it, whether you like it or not. They’ll likely do this on-line. You don’t have control over this conversation, but you can influence it… that’s the essence of social media marketing right there (and more on that in another article…)

Loyalty – simply put, these emails encourage the customer to use what they’ve just bought from you and to share their feedback of it with others, and to maintain and build the relationship you have with them through to their next purchase or for the life of the relationships – keep them saying nice things about you, your company and/or the product/service they just bought.

Here’s the original content bit…

When I first came across this it was a revelation – simple yet powerful. Even before I learnt more about the specific techniques to use for each of the 5 different types, just knowing there were 5 different types and what they were was enough for me to change my approach, and so begin to experience some real success. I know this can be the same for you too!

It strikes me that this simple framework can and should help you be more focused with article marketing, marketing by way of how you engage with people on forums for example, and on blogs. The sky is the limit!

In light of what you’ve just read, think about your own marketing campaign, be it by autoresponder, direct & mass emailings and even ezine issues. Which of the 5 types of email message could you do better with? Which of the 5 are you not doing, but should be?

As you reflect on your answers to these questions, begin to sketch out your email marketing campaign, let the ideas flow out on to paper.

My call to action is simple: create your new email marketing campaign action plan, and implement it. Now!

Let me know how you get on!

Cheers

Martin

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And this is the first of those blogs.

You might think that the biggest challenge is finding a topic each and every day for 365 days – and actually, it’s not a problem (lucky I’m not doing this in a leap year – that extra day could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back…!)

Actually, the problem is writing something relatively brief yet having something useful in it. This is a particular challenge for me – I can easily write 35,000 words, as I did for my Masters thesis, but struggled with the 10,000 word limit I was set for the thesis…

Until I came across 2 wonderfully simple techniques, courtesy of Patrick Hare, a wonderful mentor, sadly now departed…

The first is the 4-MAT system by Bernice McCarthy (see http://www.aboutlearning.com/) – simply put, and slightly adapted, the 4-MAT system challenges you to consider the WHY, WHAT, HOW and (WHAT) IF of the subject. This approach covers the major learning & thinking styles & preferences of almost everybody. This means that the impact of your writing will be larger for each person, and will affect more people too – better breadth & depth of impact. It doesn’t mean you have to split your article or presentation in to 4 separate sections, 1 for each of the 4 areas, though many do and it works well. If you give it a go you’ll soon get the hang of it and notice results almost immediately. And if you do give it a go you can also begin to adapt it to your own style and strengths…

And the sharp eyed amongst you will have spotted that the previous paragraph covers these 4 areas also… 4-MAT in practice, even for just a paragraph…

The other tip Patrick shared with me is to simply ask myself – or a subject matter expert – what are just 3 things to know about the subject at hand. For example, with 4-MAT, there are just 3 things you need to know in order to put it in to immediate practice:

1. The first is that 4-MAT is a simple, powerful framework to help you quickly structure an article or presentation, no matter how big or small – you can even use it on each section in the article or presentation. This leads to a more effective outcome.
2. The second thing to know about 4-MAT is that it only comprises 4 elements or questions to consider – WHAT, WHY, HOW and (WHAT) If.
3. The third thing you need to know about 4-MAT is that you can consider each element in any depth – deep or shallow, and in any order. You don’t have to explicitly structure your work along the lines of the 4 elements, just so long as you cover all 4 elements – for maximum effect do so within the first 2 minutes of your presentation or the reader’s reading session.

And that’s it!

I came across the subject for my first piece of original content when I was bombarded recently by stack of stories about how everybody else seemed to be successful yet so many of my clients in the past had been frustrated by them.

Right, time I headed off to write the content for day 2 of my year of original content!

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Get it direct from him at http://www.joelcomm.com/free_twitter_report.html

Enjoy!

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Go visit http://www.allgraphicdesign.com/graphicsblog/2007/11/28/120-self-promotion-ideas-for-graphic-designers-freelancers-free-or-almost-free/

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I do a lot of work with corporates, traditional marketing functions, and generally they just don’t get ‘it’ just yet. And they need to. They will, or they’ll die – it’s that simple.

So, Web 2.0 – what IS the big deal?

That’s what this article is about – in overview form.

The killer point is this, quoting Dave Evans from the introduction to his book Social Media Marketing: An Hour A Day

about the fundamental paradox of giving up control – you can’t control conversations that aren’t yours – and simultaneously gaining influence by becoming a respected member of the communities that matter to you.

So, grab a coffee, have a read. It is a big deal, and it’s the way of the future.

When paradigms shift (and this is one of those times) then all players go back to Square 1. Especially the big players…

Have a great one.

Cheers

Martin

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