Why should I pay attention to you?

May 6th, 2010 by Lorenz

I want to sell you a piece of carbon (the same material graphite is made from) that has been hardened under high temperatures under extreme weight. It won’t help you accomplish any tasks, can be reproduced synthetically and it will cost you more than your months paycheck. In fact, I’ll charge you a year’s paycheck for a big piece.

Interested?

Tiffany billboard

The reason why you should buy that piece of carbon is beautifully illustrated in this Tiffany poster. It is positioned across the Goldman Sachs offices in New York. Every day when a rich banker exits his office at dusk he is reminded that even a busy man like him can get a woman to look at him like that.

Of course I don’t sell you a piece of carbon. I don’t even sell you a beautifully cut diamond. I sell you the promise that the poster holds, a beautiful story. One where you are happy, special and where you are loved.

Now you know why you should buy a Tiffany diamond.

But why should anyone buy your product? And why should they not buy it from your competitor?

Chances are you already are special and remarkable in what you do , but do you communicate this to your customers at the moment they are making their purchase decision? Or perhaps there is something that the market is hot for and could give you a flood of customers, but you aren’t aware of?

Ask yourself a couple of simple questions

  1. What do you do? More importantly, what do you do exceptionally well? When you look at your competitors, what do you excel in. What do they excel in? Make a list.
  2. Who are your customers? What do they want, what do they need? We’ve blogged before on how you can find your target audience. Match their wants and needs to the things you could provide exceptionally well. That will be your niche. You will clearly message the things you do better than anybody else, and you will message it to the people who need that difference the most.
  3. Change the way you do business. Change everything about your business to dominate your niche. Build a profile of your customer that clearly tells you where they hang out, what they read, what they notice. Use this knowledge to advertise where your audience will see your advert, and message your unique benefit clearly, so that they understand they need to check out your business.

If you engage in this type of thinking, you can change the rules of the game. Even a small company can take a big market share from a big company, because you don’t fight them on their turf, but on a turf they haven’t even considered yet.

Marketers who want to sound smart call this ‘developing a unique selling proposition’. That is a fancy term for finding out what people want (that others perhaps overlooked) and how you can deliver on one of their needs in a way that is uniquely yours. You do this every day in many ways: for your spouse, your friends and now for a wider community of clients…

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Building win-win relationships

May 5th, 2010 by Lorenz

"I create nothing. I own." - Gekko

Gordon Gekko coined the phrase “Greed is good”. It seemed lost on the wider business community that Gekko was the villain of the piece, a caricature meant to personify everything that is wrong with business. Instead, the mantra was adopted by the Wall Street Journal in its opinion pages and spread like a virus through the business community.

The irony is that it is a bit like Darth Vader’s “Give yourself to the Dark Side” becoming a mantra in our society. Both Vader and Gekko where the antagonists of the story, but somehow, Gekko became the ‘good antagonist’, an anti-hero.

Despite several recessions caused by short term greed that lead to a failure to calculate long-term, often systemic risk, the mantra “Greed is Good” remained alive and well, empowering lawyers who like to argue “Caveat emptor” in court to defend their clients’ dubious business dealings.

Is it wrong for a business to sell you goods they don’t believe in? Goldman Sachs believe it isn’t. And since they sell risk, they might not be entirely wrong.

Still, people are outraged. And with good reason. Instinctively, we know that if you don’t create a win-win situation, you rob society of a chance to grow.

Creating win-win relationships creates powerful ripples through society: you get recommended more, you get more repeat sales, when somebody gives you money for your product and service, they make more money back then they invested. That profit leads to more spending and the economy grows.

Creating win-win relationships is vital for your business. You cannot expect your clients, your customers, suppliers, affiliates and others to be loyal to your brand unless they all stand to win as much as you do.

Greed implies that you eat someone else’s lunch. Somewhere, something in society is lost and someone walks away hungry. Goldman Sachs allegedly made a profit by misrepresenting the potential returns on investment of the risk they sold (the emails suggest this) and created part of the economic collapse.

In the end, this type of greed meant we all had a little bit less.

Now it is time for your business to create win-wins, create the conditions for your growth based on someone else’s growth, and rebuild the economy.

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First impressions

May 4th, 2010 by Lorenz

You are taking a walk in the forest, hoping to relax. In the corner of your eye you spot something yellow and black striped. Millions and years of evolution kick in: your hypothalamus sends a message to your adrenal glands and within seconds, your heart beats faster, your sight gets better, your strength improves, your thoughts speed up. You become a mini Bruce Banner, but luckily for you you don’t rip out of your clothes.

Upon inspection you’ll probably find that somebody left a yellow and black jacket behind from their last camping trip. You deplore their fashion sense and move on with your journey.

But what does this have to do with marketing?

Everything.

Based on this first impression, wouldn't you scrutinize what this school teaches your kids?

Our brains are programmed to make instantaneous judgments. We no longer live in an environment where dangerous animals could pose a threat, but we still function as it does.

And that’s why it takes years to build a business but only 1/10th of a second to lose a sale: because or brains are wired to make the most important judgment in a blink of an eye and not to trust the flood of information that comes after that 1/10th of a second. After all, if a cavemen stood there to think about what the yellow and black stripes really could be, he or she could be dinner for some exotic animal.

The truth of this is nicely summed up in the saying: “the suit makes the man”. We all know that “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover” but in evolutionary terms, if you met another caveman, you had to make a split second decision whether the other was a friend / foe / leader / follower / harmless being, lest not to knocked out stone cold and have your women and food resources stolen from you.

Somehow I don't expect to find many millionaires in this club...

For the purpose of this blog post I wore a seersucker suit for the day. Doormen, cashiers, prospects treated me differently. In the age of casual dress, I was stunned just how much difference a $99 suit that looks just that bit different makes.

First impressions don’t only matter, they define a narrative about you and your business that is hard to alter once it is established. You never get a second chance at making your first impression, so you’d better get it right. And you better not overdo it: make it just enough, leave room to negotiate, get to know each other and define that unique relationship.

Putting on a magnificent suit won’t do the trick every time of course. You don’t know what the first contact will be, so you should cover all your bases.

Not so great first impressions:

This parking lot must be very empty...

I guess they had a drink before making this sign

Intellectual stimulation guaranteed

Intellectual stimulation guaranteed

Time to take some of your own advice

Might be a typo. Or a new religion.

Imagine their attention to detail when cleaning your car

I guess God isn't bigger than your spelling problems

You gotta love experts

Try to look proud when wearing this garment

Somehow I am not surprised

Shop here if you want your computer destroyed

I don't feel unortherised. Great, let's park here.

Hayyp newyears are so hip

Covering all your bases

Have you thought about making a great first impression at your first point of contact? Here’s just a few to consider:

* Business cards
* Stationary
* Emails
* Voice Mails
* Presentations
* Website
* Networking
* Telephone
* Word of mouth
* Trade shows
* Publications
* Ephemera (short lived publications)
* Packaging
* Product
* Place
* Staff
* Location
* Vehicles
* Services
* Products
* Speeches
* Corporate identity
* Advertising
* Public Relations
* Public Affairs
* Civic marketing – give back to the supporting community
* Sales Promotion
* Environments
* Experiences
* Newsletters
* Business forms
* Exhibits
* Signage
* Point of Sale
* Livery – delivery of goods

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an interesting book about the power of thinking without thinking.

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A one word marketing plan

May 3rd, 2010 by Lorenz

CARE.

From that flows everything else. You’ll take greater interest in your clients, you’ll sit down and discuss solutions to their problems, you’ll devise specific answers to the pains they feel and you’ll be able to charge a premium because of your unique value to them.

This month I’ll be writing about marketing basics. But they could all be summed up by that one word.

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Don’t reinvent – combine!

April 29th, 2010 by Lorenz

To conclude our series on how to create an effective business website, we’ll create a number of case studies that demonstrate how moving your business online can help increase sales.

Are their popular ideas or trends in your industry that you can combine to create a new product?

OurStage just did and created a whole new community.

American Idol was America’s most watched TV series last year, and YouTube is arguably one of the most popular online destinations.

Our Stage LogoOurStage looked at these trends and came up with a simple business plan: combine the two and create an online American idol type competition through user created video files.

In fact, they improved on the concept, by segmenting the music competitions into genres such as Acoustic, Indie/Alternative, Electronic, Metal, Solo Performance and Reggae, giving a forum for those who don’t champion pop music.
They further extended the model to include film makers who can submit their materials in categories such as Animation, Comedy, Short Films, Trailers, Documentaries and so forth.

Creative types can upload their content, and the rest of us can judge works side by side, vote for our favorites and see them progress ’till one takes the Grand Prize for that month (a whopping 5,000 US dollars).

Our Stage Screenshot

What more, the power is put firmly back into the hands of the people who are actually purchasing CDs, concert tickets, movie passes and DVDs – in other words: given large enough a user forum, OurStage can inform on sure bet artists in all genres, something they could benefit from in a myriad of ways.

What is it that you can combine to create a product with added appeal? It doesn’t need to be anything as ground breaking as OurStage, but could be something as simple as combining an element of game-play with your education packages, combine calorie-counters with your food delivery service or trying to create a community around your brand.

Take Spotlight Live for an example: they created a hybrid between a restaurant and American Idol. Their motto is: “Eat, drink and be famous” and they offer a four-story performance amphitheater, setting the stage for aspiring popstars and starlets who are supported by a team of entertainment professionals to create the live performance of a lifetime. The acts are broadcasted online and on Spotlight Live’s own Times Square Jumbotron! You can come to their restaurant in the heart of New York’s Time Square to eat some whimsical American cuisine while watching live American Idol style entertainment.

The only limitation is your imagination…

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Finding a new angle

April 28th, 2010 by Lorenz

To conclude our series on how to create an effective business website, we’ll create a number of case studies that demonstrate how moving your business online can help increase sales.

Do you know the needs and wants of your target groups. Could you further segment them and identify sub-groups who have need that are unmet?
Medical recruitment agencies focus on the nuts and bolts of the job when attempting to attract doctors and nurses.

MedRecruit has shaken up the game by explicitly including lifestyle in the process of matching doctors with positions. Doctors who sign up for their free service not only detail their medical specialty and grade, but also specify the location they want to work and what sorts of family, cultural and recreational opportunities they are expecting, whether it is skiing, surfing or bungee jumping.

MedRecruit proudly states that their service results in happier doctors and higher retention rates for the hospitals that hire them.

Are you working for a recruitment agency? Are there hard to fill positions that could benefit from this approach?

Or how could you further segment your target audience, by looking for needs that are yet not catered for?

To stay in the same industry: Connect moms found an unexpected gap in the market when they started an employment agency for young moms.

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Vmeals: embracing virtual sales

April 27th, 2010 by Lorenz

To conclude our series on how to create an effective business website, we’ll create a number of case studies that demonstrate how moving your business online can help increase sales. The first in our series is Vmeals, led by CEO W. Carter Hoerr. Vmeals is a beautifully designed site that takes full advantage of the new opportunities the web offers.

Vmeals website

Vmeals website

Feet on the street model

Carter Hoerr: Vmeals is an “old” web-based business that relied on “feet on the street” sales reps to prospect and sell to customers. Our website was primarily an ordering tool used by our customers once we had sold them on our service.

Vmeals moves online

Carter Hoerr: In the last year, we’ve made a concerted effort to make our website more of a “virtual” sales and marketing tool. We added a video demo on our home page that explains our somewhat complicated corporate catering service and value proposition.

Lorenz Lammens: Vmeals shows us how a website can generate success by embracing the different media the internet allows us to use. If you offer a complex product, adding a video can increase comprehension of your offering. Ask yourself if your message strategy could benefit from incorporating different media solutions such as video to simplify the message. Integrating video in your website doesn’t need to be expensive. By using services like Vimeo or YouTube you can shift the bandwidth cost of streaming video to those providers, making it essentially free for you after the initial production cost.

Carter Hoerr: We can now track prospect visits to our site, so we know what they’re looking at, bounce rates, time on site, etc.

Lorenz Lammens: We discussed in an earlier blog post how you should segment your target market. The truth about defining your target market is that it is an ongoing process. Carter tracks his visitors and by doing this understands what content they find interesting. This enables Vmeals to understand what content their users want, and what different user types appreciate different content. Ultimately, by tracking the visitors to your site, you understand how a segment finds your web page and what content leads them to the sale. It also helps you identify bottlenecks (pages on your site where you lose the customer). You can optimize the sales process by taking the learnings from the successful sales and apply them where sales have failed. Tracking your visitor doesn’t need to cost anything. Solutions like Google Analytics allow you to implement an advanced tracking package on your website free of charge.

SEO and keyword research for Vmeals

Lorenz Lammens: if you are unsure what SEO means, read our article: “What is SEO?”.

Carter Hoerr: We updated our content and links to increase our SEO effectiveness. We added separate landing pages for specific PPC and email marketing campaigns, so we could track response rates and capture lead information.

Lorenz Lammens: Adding separate landing pages is important, because you want to know what marketing campaigns work well and which need updating. If you tie each one of your online marketing campaigns to one page, you can easily see which efforts generate traffic and conversion and which need updating. Read our blog post about tracking the effectiveness of your marketing campaign for both offline and online campaigns.

Carter Hoerr: We added a separate Vmeals blog site to increase awareness, engage our customers, and improve our SEO. These changes have really helped. About half of our new customers find us now through online search or referrals, while the other half still come “the old way” through traditional sales rep prospecting. This has expanded our brand reach and lowered our cost of sales.

Keyword research and link tracking

Carter Hoerr: We use software (Hubspot) to carefully track our keywords and incorporate them into our site content. We also tie together our various marketing channels: web site, blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and PR to achieve higher SEO ranking. We’ve also worked on basic SEO like page URLs, meta descriptions, etc. Our organic search visitors run about twice the rate of our PPC visitors.

Lorenz Lammens: Hubspot is an excellent solution to grow your traffic. But for companies on a budget, the price charged by Hubspot might be steep. There are however free alternatives to the services that Hubspot offers. But that is beyond the scope of this blog post. If you want to know free tools for a specific problem you like to solve, feel free to ask us about it in the comments of this post, or ask for advice in our forum.

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The endless pitch

April 26th, 2010 by Lorenz

Every businessman has a pitch, that story that’s always with him.  They tell it to everyone who wants to hear it.

The hardest part is getting someones permission to tell your story. But once you have that permission, it is often wasted because we forget to keep telling our story.

Why would I? They know the story already.

People need to hear the story over and over again. Most advertising only leads to interest and or action upon the 7th viewing. People don’t absorb the first time around, people habituate to possibilities, to ideas. They require warming up, developing sympathy.

But your story is never exactly the same. The world is not the same place it was last year. Regulations and environmental policies have changed it. Somehow, somewhere, you had to adapt. You are looking forward, you can sense the next chapter, where it’s all going, and you want to incorporate that and help others take advantage.

Small changes, but that is where all power of marketing usually lays: telling your story over and over again, letting it sink in, getting through. It is seldom that there are big announcements that could persuade people to buy into you. More often it’s that they need to be told until they get it.

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What Belgian monks can teach you about branding

April 22nd, 2010 by Lorenz

Westvleteren is a beer produced by an order of Belgian Trappist monks in my country of birth. The beer has achieved cult status for two reasons: it is superior in taste and it is difficult to obtain. If you want to purchase their beer you have to:

  • make an appointment to buy the brew by calling the Beer Phone. Yes, you read it right, the Beer Phone. The monks, who have taken a vow of silence, make an exception to talk to you at this special phone
  • The beer remains unlabeled, and is sold only once a month. A limit of two cases per person applies.
  • The monks cap production at 60,000 cases per year.

It is a powerful example in driving up price and brand equity by offering an intangible add-on value. Westvleteren is a beer like any other, but by changing the way the beer is created and the scarcity with which it is distributed they add a spiritual and religious element to it.

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Think small, stay small

April 21st, 2010 by Lorenz

Act like the company you want to be, not what you represent now.

Remember, you became a CEO, a manager, a director by acting like one. The actual experience and title the job required came afterward.

I was talking to a young entrepreneur this morning, who wasn’t willing to take the next step. ‘We are not ready yet’.

And exactly there lies the problem: in that limited self-believe that states: ‘we are not big enough’. If you have the resources, the cash, the opportunity; then get your hands dirty and rise to a new level.

Shun the comfort zone.

Think as big as you can afford today, and you will be just that tomorrow.

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