As I write this in Portland, OR, it is 78°F under a crystal clear blue sky. Yesterday was gorgeous as well and the forecasters promise several more days like this. It definitely feels like summertime is approaching. We’ve already been buying freshly picked strawberries from the roadside stands and the local farmers markets have opened. It’s hard to sit at a computer and work under conditions like this!

There will be graduations to attend, early vacations and a host of other mostly outdoor activities coming up over the next few months. Participation in indoor networking events will be down, but the several al fresco events in Portland will be mobbed, even if it’s hot like last year. That’s because we live for the upcoming sunny months. They renew us in spirit, feed our bodies with vitamin D, encourage us to exercise more and just generally improve our moods.

There will be street fairs and celebrations that provide sellers with opportunities to bring their wares closer to their customers in convivial atmospheres. More people will be walking in neighborhood business districts and thus more likely to visit retail establishments. Restaurants with outside seating will be making more money well into the evening hours. It really is a wonderful time of year.

It’s also time to take a look at your marketing activities to make sure that you capitalize on your opportunities to attract more customers and make more sales. Get that table at the street fair. Hold a sidewalk sale – or two or three at reasonable intervals. Provide gift coupons to your loyal customers for outdoor activities they might enjoy. Perhaps you can partner with other vendors to do this without incurring too much extra expense by cross-promoting each other.

Participate in a parade if your town does one. Or sponsor concerts and movies in the parks, a very popular set of events here in Portland. Partner with a local ice cream or frozen yogurt store to do a promotion. Or rent a snow cone machine and the people to run it. Hire a face painter or a professional balloon artist to bring families with children to your establishment. Offer a mid-afternoon “happy hour” if you run a restaurant.

Celebrate the summer with your prospects and customers so they remember you fondly in the Fall and during the Winter months. And please share your ideas for summer business promotions with my readers and I. We’d love to hear from you. Enjoy June!
Scoop.it
 

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The 2013 A to Z blog posts have been moved to electronic and printed books called The A to Z Blog Book now available on Kindle in electronic form and from Amazon in print form.

The Kindle Electronic Version is available at no charge until May 28th.  If you act fast you’ll save $3.95. All I ask is that you write a review.

Here is the information on the Amazon Print Version available for $15.95:

The A to Z Blog Book: 26 Articles to Entertain, Inform and Intrigue you.

Contents include:

1. The Power of the Word “Ask”
2. “B” is for Benefits…
3. The “C” Words
4. Decisions, decisions…
5. Emotions, Empathy and Engagement
6. Features, Flash and Other “F” Words
7. Go for the Guts
8. “H” is for Help
9. iWords
10. Jargon and Junk
11. KISS — As In Keep It Simple Silly (or other “S” words)
12. The Likeability Factor
13. Markets, Messaging and Media
14. Networking Necessities, Niceties and No-No’s
15. Are You Omniscient?
16. How’s Your Perspicacity?
17. Questions, questions, questions…
18. Are You Responsive to Your Customers?
19. Success Stories and Strategies
20. Truth, Trust and Transactions
21. Usury of a Different Kind
22. Voracious, Vexing and Very, Very Necessary
23. Wondering Why
24. X-Ray Vision
25. YOU Deserve Some Thanks!
26. Zip, Zero, Zilch

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I spent some time today putting together a set of small videos that I’d like to share with you. Some have to do with free offers – the website Event Calendar and the Marketing Strategy Development e-Book – and others have to do with asking you to spend some money with me.

The very inexpensive offers are The Piano Story and the Marketing Plan and Marketing Strategy Worksheets. Very inexpensive and very, very useful to you.

The more expensive offers have to do with the Instant Strategy Session and the Monthly Mentoring Mode. Certainly more costly but much more in depth and personalized service for you.

I’d love to do business with you and I hope you’ll both enjoy these short videos and respond to their calls for action. Because I could use the business and I’m betting that you could use the help! Just click the links above to visit the applicable pages and view the videos.

Thanks for reading – and watching. And please do let me know what other products and services that you would find useful.

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Are you inundated by the latest “must have” tactics in your marketing strategy mix? If so, I suggest that you smite those tactics until you step back and take a broader view of your overall marketing strategy. Don’t succumb to the siren song of any new tactic until you figure out if it will do you some good.

To whom are you marketing? Are you in the B2B or B2C business? What are the demographics of your markets in terms of age, occupation, income and interests? What kinds of activities are your prospects interested in and how do they find out about them? Mightn’t that information provide some valuable insights to guide you in the selection of your messages and the media you use to deliver them?

Who buys the largest quantities of what you sell, and where can you find more of those kinds of customers? Are there uses for your products or services outside your existing customer base that could be exploited with new messaging? Would new media selection help your message go viral? Is going viral what you want? Can you support that level of activity?

The right hierarchy for your marketing strategy decisions is goals first, strategy second and tactics third. So if those tactics are distracting you or diluting your overall goal and strategy work then I suggest you smite them until it’s time to consider which of them you’ll actually want to implement to support your plans.

Comments, as always, are solicited and thanks for reading.

Scoop.it

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There’s an old joke about a man whose pastor decided that it was time for him to be baptized into the faith. So the pastor took the man down to the river and, after saying the appropriate words, dunked the man’s head into the river for a few seconds. When the man’s head was out of the water and he had shaken the water off his face, the pastor asked him if he believed. The man said that he wasn’t sure.

So the pastor said some more words and dunked the man’s head into the river for several tens of seconds. When the man’s head came out of the water for the second time and he had caught his breath and shaken the water off, the pastor asked him again if he believed. And again the man said he wasn’t sure.

Getting frustrated, this time the pastor regaled him with a full sermon on why he needed to believe and held the man’s head in the river for a full minute. When the man’s head was finally released and he spluttered and shook the water off and took several deep breaths, the pastor asked for a third time if the man believed. And this time the man said that he did indeed believe.

Just to make sure that the baptism had really been effective, the pastor asked the man what he believed. And the man replied that he believed that the pastor was trying to drown him.

With so much emphasis on social media these days, one could wonder how much of the blog postings and social media content to believe. This is especially true now with the focus on social media return on investment (ROI).

Do you believe that social media has value in building your relationships with your prospects and customers? I certainly do. Do you believe that you need to post interesting and relevant content in order to nurture those relationships? I certainly do. Do you believe that you need to interact with your customers, sometimes in almost real time, via social media? I certainly do.

Do you believe that you can put absolute numbers, in dollars and cents terms, on the results you are gaining from your social media efforts? I certainly don’t. And you can immerse me in words and arguments and articles and posts until day turns into night and I think then that I’ll only believe that you are trying to drown me in “facts” until I acquiesce to believing something.

Don’t get me wrong here. I do believe that our social media efforts, properly directed and executed, are important. And that they do provide a return on our investment in both tangible and intangible ways. But when I’m asked to prove it with debits and credits and dollars and cents I’m afraid that I have to revert to faith alone. Because I don’t believe anyone has yet to come up with a proof that an accurate equation exists.

I’d love to have your opinions on this viewpoint. And thanks for reading.
Scoop.it

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I’m going to continue posting the materials from my Udemy.com online course entitled The Marketing Plan Seminar in 2013 so that my followers can get a feel for the kind of work that I can do for them on a consulting basis. If you can’t wait for the installments to be posted you can order the complete course at http://udemy.com/The-Marketing-Plan-Seminar at any time. In the mean time, I hope you will enjoy each small installment and please do give me a call if doing so triggers something for you where I can be of help with an Instant Strategy Session or working with you longer term with the Monthly Mentoring Mode.  Enjoy!

This image goes with the accompanying video that is part of the online Marketing Plan Seminar. This is slide number 8.

While we need to answer the first three questions on this slide, we really need to think about the fourth bullet — how will we convert leads to prospects to (new) customers and how will be both retain and convert new customers to repeat customers.

Elements of a Marketing Plan — 3

We’re really asking three questions here. Who are the real target markets we’re trying to reach, what messages that hopefully will resonate with these target markets are we trying to convey, and what is the best media to use to get those messages to those target markets in the best and most cost effective way.

Order the complete course today so that you’ll be ready for 2013 and won’t have to wait for the next twelve slides!

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This image goes with the accompanying video that is part of the online Marketing Plan Seminar. This is slide number 7.

Here we see the hierarchy of goals, strategies and tactics. Too often people fall into the “tactic of the day” trap and go off developing tactics before setting initial goals, supporting the goals with strategies and then implementing tactics that will support them.

 Elements of a Marketing Plan — 2

The “bottom line” here is to make sure that you develop things in the right sequence.

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This image goes with the accompanying video that is part of the online Marketing Plan Seminar. This is slide number 6.

This slide illustrates the first thing that you’ll want to do in developing your marketing plan: market research. Have a look and a listen to this one. The better your research the better your plan will be.

Elements of a Marketing Plan — 1

You’ll want to make sure that you take a real objective look at your markets — people who are really likely to be intersted in what you can supply. You’ll want to estimate the size of your market(s) and segment them into niches where appropriate.  “Everyone” is not a well defined target market!

You also need to identify competitors, not only for your product or service but also for the overall dollars that are available from your prospective customers for your type of product or service. Look also at barriers to entry. How expensive is it to enter the market? What regulations or licenses could impact your entry into the market? And what about physical location needs and alternatives if you are considering a brick and mortar based business.

The more complete your research, the better your planning results will be.  Don’t skimp on this step!

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If you aren’t familiar with the term, WebMD defines the scotoma as “An isolated area of varying size and shape, within the visual field, in which vision is absent or depressed.” And as “A blind spot in psychological awareness.”  The first one discusses a physical manifestation while the second refers to a psychological manifestation. And that is the one I want to talk about.

The psychological scotoma is most often discussed in the context of cognitive dissonance — typically described as the feeling of discomfort when simultaneously holding two or more differing ideas, beliefs, values or emotional reactions. The phrase was coined by Leon Festinger in 1956 and published in his 1957 book called “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.” According to Festinger, people engage in a process he termed “dissonance reduction” which can be achieved in one of three ways: lowering the importance of one of the discordant factors, adding consonant elements, or changing one of the dissonant factors.

In plain English what is being said is this:  If reality as you are experiencing it does not match the vision of reality that you are holding in your mind, you will feel disharmony. And your subconscious mind will do whatever it takes to resolve that disharmony by either changing or applying a scotoma (blind spot) to your currently held vision or causing you to do whatever is necessary to change your current reality into something that matches your currently held vision.

This theory, which is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology, is the basis for a technique called visual image formation. Using this method you create picture in your mind of how things are when you have achieved your goals. The picture is created in the present tense and is supported by a connected emotional good feeling like lying on a beach or getting married (presuming that was a happy experience!). If your current reality doesn’t match this picture, your creative subconscious will help you do the things you need to make reality as it is match reality as you envision it.

There is a great book called The Magic of Believing, written by Claude M. Bristol and published in 1983, that goes into this theory in great practical rather than scientific detail and I highly recommend it to you. Because it also warns of the second way in which disharmony can be resolved: by altering your mental vision, typically with a scotoma. Your creative subconscious will resolve the disharmony,but you want that to happen by fixing your reality, not altering your vision. Or “patching” it with a scotoma to block out the uncomfortable or disharmonious feelings.

It helps sometimes to revisit your vision on a regular basis to make sure that certain parts of it haven’t been papered over with scotomas that have reduced your energies toward making reality as it is match reality as it should be.

There’s a lot more to this story than will fit here and perhaps I’ll elaborate in a future post. In the meantime, please let me have your comments on this post.  Thanks for reading and I hope this helps you identify and eliminate your scotomas.

Scoop.it

The post How’s Your Scotoma Quotient? appeared first on Jon Turino.

Authority versus Power

Do you know the difference between these two terms? And I don’t mean just the dictionary difference, I mean the difference in behavioral terms of both those wield and those who submit to one or another of their forms.

You may be given the authority, by someone with higher authority or with real or perceived power, to sign checks in your company, to hire and fire people, to issue purchase orders (up to your authorized amount) and the like. This authority was given to you and it may be revoked at any time for any reason, however arbitrary (although the more arbitrary the reason the more justified it will be).

Power, on the other hand, is something that you give yourself, even if you have no authority to grant it to yourself. And no one can take it away from you. Let me give you an example.

The supply room people in your company are tired of being interrupted all the time by people demanding pencils, pens, paper, paper clips, staples, copies, etc. So they put out a memo that says, in essence, “In order to serve you better, office supplies will now be available for pickup on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 AM to Noon and from 2 PM to 4 PM. Please drop your written and approved request forms – downloadable on the company Intranet – at least 24 hours in advance to insure that your supplies will be ready for pickup at the time you choose. – Supply Room Management”

Who gave the supply room “management” the authority to modify the behavior of everyone in the company who uses office supplies? No one did. They gave themselves the power to change their environment and work habits by issuing the memo – and publishing it to the whole company because they also own the copy machines and do the mail deliveries! And who is going to question their obvious attempt to be more helpful to everyone? Aren’t they doing this “in order to serve you better?” You don’t want better service? What are you, some kind of subversive chronic complainer who needs to be reported up the management chain?

OK, the CEO’s admin wants something on Wednesday. Are the supply room folks going to give her a hard time?  Of course they’re not.  They’ll bend over backwards to make her happy so that she compliments their wonderful service to her boss. So guess what he thinks when he hears a complaint about their “in order to serve you better” memo? You’ve got it.

Think about this the next time you decide to submit to an arbitrary “rule” provided by someone “in authority.”  Make sure that it’s not an example of the misuse of power I’ve described above.  And think about it as well when you think you can do some real good by assuming the power to do so!

As always, your comments are solicited.  And thanks for reading. Much more on this topic to follow in the future.

 Scoop.it

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