Tag: strategy

Posted on

Markets, Messages and Media

Markets, Media and Messages for MoneyThere’s been a ton of discussion in one of my Linkedin groups about the “Three Ps” of marketing. Some of it has been practical and some pretty esoteric. Some pretty bland and some pretty heated. Some to the point and some veering pretty far off. Even to the point of introducing the Three As, the Three Bs, the Three Cs, etc., with the possibility of twenty six Three Things (using the English alphabet.  So I figure I can put my two cents in for the Three Ms — Markets, Messages and Media. Because this is where I concentrate with my clients when it comes to marketing strategy development.

If you participate in networking groups you’ve no doubt heard the advice about providing your fellow participants with fairly specific targets in response to the “Who is a good lead for you?” question. The idea here is to avoid “spray and pray” marketing by trying to sell to everyone whether they might need or want your product or service or not.

You’ll need to hone your messages to resonate with their needs and wants if you expect to get them to respond to your calls to action. What problems can you solve for them? How much time or money can you save them? What painful situations can you extricate them from or prevent from happening with your offering. What will they get if they do what you ask? What’s the benefit that’s in it for them?

If you pay attention to the demographics of your real target market niches, you’ll use the right media to try to get their attention with your tailored messages.  That means avoiding the “tactic of the day” trap, or throwing darts in the dark as I described it in an earlier blog post. How many 70 year old people shopping for cemetery plots are doing that on their iPhones or Android smart phones? Do you really need that mobile app to reach them or is there a more appropriate and more effective media for doing so?

Markets, messages and media. Three critical “Ms” that are central to your marketing strategies. Have you reviewed yours lately? Do they still fit with what you are trying to do, who you are trying to reach and how you are reaching them or could they use a fresh look from your advisory board or an outside consultant?

Give that some thought. And please let me know what you think about what I’ve said as well.  Thanks for reading and I look forward to receiving your comments.

 

Posted on

Making Some Tough Decisions

Times Are Tough - Decisions IllustrationI’ve been working on the upcoming (October 2, 2012) issue of myConnections Newsletter Logo newsletter and as I was examining the MailChimp statistics I came to some conclusions. They’ll be announced in the newsletter itself next week but I thought I’d share them now with those of you who might not have been opening the newsletter regularly or who would like to be informed a little in advance.

The upcoming issue will be the 10th issue of my newsletter and I really enjoy writing it for everyone who reads it. I am always pleased when someone makes it a point to tell me at a networking event how much they enjoy it. I do try to keep it fresh with great content culled from all over the web that I think you’ll actually be able to use.

It is also a lot of work to put that missive together every three weeks. I save links to articles, groups, organizations and resources that I think will be helpful to you as I find them between issues and then curate the best into each new issue.

This newsletter is currently being mailed to 993 email addresses. All are people who I have met and who have shown interest in receiving information from me. Yet the average open rate for this newsletter is only 20.2%.  That’s better than the industry average of 18.1% for my kind of newsletter, but it is still very disappointing. So I’m going to raise my open rate by a whole bunch over the next few issues.

How will I do such a thing? There are really only two ways to do that. I can contine to try to get more of you to open this newsletter, read it and click through on things of interest to you. Or I can begin removing the 770+ people who don’t ever open it from my email list. I’m going to do some of both, of course, and it won’t be an abrupt change, but it is going to happen.

I want to make sure that my efforts reach people who care about growing their businesses through better marketing strategies and, frankly, who will begin to spend some money with me on doing that. An Instant Strategy Session is only $125. The Marketing Plan Seminar online course is only $79. You can sign up for monthly mentoring for as little as $100 per month. There’s only so much I can do without revenue from the product and service packages I offer to support the ongoing freely supplied calendar, resource and newsletter efforts.

If you and I can’t figure out some ways for you to do some better marketing to grow your business with my help then neither of us is worth our salt and I, at least, should stop my current activities and get a “real” job!

So please don’t be one of the 770+ who will lose access to what many consider a very valuable resource. Open each issue and make use of the materials contained in it. And please see if you can’t figure out how best to support my ongoing efforts on your behalf by sending some business my way. That way we’ll both win!


Posted on

The Power of a Vision

VisionI heard it way back when from Steve Thornton at the 2012 Portland Success Summit. I’ve heard it from Zig Ziglar.  I’ve heard it from Anthony Robbins. I think I’ve heard it from every motivational speaker that I’ve ever had the privilege of listening to, starting 35 years ago with Louis Tice when I worked for the John Fluke Manufacturing Company.

(Quick aside:  With a name like Fluke, you had better deliver results that aren’t flukes, just like Smuckers needs to deliver good tasting jams and jellies!)

I’ve not only heard it and read about it in books including The Magic of Believing, and continued to use it, but I’ve actually taught it to others. And I am still amazed at the power of a vision.

If you can create a clear picture in your mind of how things are — will be, but in the present tense — when you are doing what you most want to do, your subconscious will cause you to resolve the conflict between the current picture of your reality and the reality as you imagine it. Your subconscious does not like conflict, or disharmony as I once heard it described. It wants you to feel content.

So if you create a vision of how you are when you have accomplished the goals you need to achieve your vision, and if you can couple that with a “feeling good” emotion, it will lead you to do the things necessary to change reality as it is today into reality as you visualize it. Or it will modify your picture of reality as you visualize to match where you are now and keep you stuck where you are. But it will resolve the conflict, one way or the other.

This is not new age weirdness. It is proven science that works for people in business, in athletics, in medicine and in any other field. And there are too many people who have used it, continue to use it, proselytize about it and, in fact succeed with it, to ignore.

If you haven’t been exposed to this powerful mechanism for changing your life, you owe it to yourself to learn as much as you can about it as soon as possible so that you can begin to use it to achieve your vision in life. Unless, of course, you are perfectly happy with the way things are in your life right now.

As I used to tell my students:  Make a picture, make it real and make it feel. Your creative subconscious will go to work for you to help you make your vision a reality.

Want more? Order your copy of Inspiration Now! today.

 

Posted on

Reflections on Being an Educator

Food in TaiwanThose of you who have read my many blog posts know that “once upon a time” I traveled the world teaching — and preaching — topics that I was passionate about. I did it because I believed in my causes. And because I made a pretty good living at it. And because I loved visiting new places.

Each one was a new learning experience about people and cultures even as I taught technical, management and marketing subjects. I still do that today, thankfully without nearly as much of the travel, and I still love to see companies grow as a result, at least in part, because of my work with them.

I remember by first trip to Taiwan. The Chung Shan Institute of Science and Technology had sent five people to Chicago, where I was doing a public seminar, to see whether or not I could do it for their people in Taipei. These people had traveled half way around the world, with multiple delays, to participate in the day’s events. It was a challenge to keep them awake with their jet lag during the seminar, which was technical in nature, but the after-hours meeting went well and they decided to spend the $10,000 it would take to bring me to their organization. So off to Taiwan I went.

I was met by a driver and an assistant upon arrival after passing through customers with seven carousels of 35mm slides and five boxes containing 50 binders containing 300+ page each. Thankfully I had created paperwork saying that it was all for demonstration purposes and not for import and had affixed my company’s corporate seal over my signature. Very official looking and quite acceptable to the customs people. Phew! Hurdle number one navigated after my travel half way around the world.

I was given a day to recover from jet lag and then joined the top managers of the Institute for a formal dinner in a top restaurant. And I waited a long time to see what the other people would eat before selecting my meal from the large spinning circular central table upon which the food was arrayed. And finally my host told me to please take some food so that everyone could begin to eat. No one, it turns out, would begin until I, the honored guest, approved each dish.

The food was exquisite. I have no idea what was in most of the dishes, but when in Taiwan, go with the flow! And speaking of flow, there was a lot of rice wine flowing, but it was not to be imbibed without a toast to the person on the left prior to raising a glass. To drink without the toast was clearly an insult. Something that was also explained to me after my first two sips.

OK, this is getting long. The point I was going to make when I started this post was that my hosts, who had paid me a lot of money, were treating me like royalty. During the two days of seminar presentation, they took me to a separate private room during breaks for coffee so that I could have a slight break. And they took me outside for lunch so that I was not required to answer questions during a meal break. In short, I truly felt more respected than I had every previously felt.

I asked my hosts about my treatment as they took me back to the airport after the seminar.  Why, I asked, had they treated me so well? And they were surprised at the question. They explained to me that educators, paid or not, were held in the highest esteem and should only be treated as such. And that they were honored that I would come to speak to their staff.

I think about this experience now and then as I teach people about marketing. I know that I gave 110% during my days in Taiwan because to do less would have been to dishonor my hosts. And that I will not do.

As you provide your product or service, I hope you will think of both your customers and your suppliers as honored partners. For they deserve no less than that.

Comments, pro and con, are welcome as always.  Thanks for reading.

 

Posted on

Version 1.0

Version 1.0 IllustrationI have to say that the number of comments I’ve received about my posts about the WOW customer experience has been gratifying. Some comments have related to the need to get things to market now and letting quality and functionality follow, which I find incredibly short-sighted in the majority of cases, while others have agreed with me about the need to get things right the first time if you want to avoid headaches in customer support down the road or the actual failure of your company due to bad product reviews.

The best comment, however, came from my good friend Peter van Geijn in Munich, Germany. His company sponsored my seminars and workshops in Germany in the 1980s and he recently reminded me of the story I used to tell about Version 1.0.  It goes something like this…

Did you know that the only people who never miss a development schedule milestone are software design engineers?  That’s right, software engineers. If today was the day they were supposed to deliver the product, today is the day that they will deliver it. It will be called Version 1.0.

It will be missing a lot of the originally specified functionality, of course, since there was no time to implement it all during the unrealistic management-dictated, all-too-short schedule, but it will be delivered today.  As Version 1.0.

It will also like contain a large number of “undocumented features,” known in the old days as “bugs,” that will have to be addressed in a future version release. But it will be delivered today. As Version 1.0.

Marketing and sales people hate Version 1.0 because it makes selling the product successfully more difficult and causes customers to complain to them — a lot. It also makes it difficult to get early testimonials and delays the purchase of large quantities of the product until the bugs are worked out.

Designers don’t mind. They keep cranking out new code and patches for the bugs. Sometimes it’s great job security and other times it isn’t. If it isn’t there’s always the next product for the next company to be developed.

Customer support managers love it for the job security reasons as well — subject to the risk of no job at all if the product can’t be fixed in time to save the company.

If the product was developed with OPM (other people’s money), top management will get rich in any case and move on to start another company where they can dictate another unreasonable schedule for a product that must do everything, cost nothing and be done yesterday. It is called Version 1.0.

I’d love to hear your experiences with products that fit this mold. Please share them and thanks for reading.

 

Posted on

Media Selection for Your Target Markets

Design to TestAre you a “spray and pray” marketer who tries to sell your product or service to anyone and everyone?  How is that working for you?

To be most effective you need to find people with problems that you can solve. It’s best if you are the only solution, fairly good if you are one of a few with a good reputation and not so good if you are one of many and have to compete on price.

Once upon a time, many years past, I marketed expensive automatic test equipment for the electronics companies of the world. Doing that gave me the opportunity to learn some important things. One of those things was that the design of the product to be tested had a lot to do with the time, effort and cost of generating an effective test program and with actually testing the product in a manufacturing environment. Another was that design engineers couldn’t care less about manufacturing test because that was someone else’s problem. They just had to get the functionality right on a very tight schedule. The third thing was that test engineers, who had to solve the problems that were “thrown over the wall” from development engineering to manufacturing test, were desperate for help.

Thus came the opportunity to write a book. It contained all of the techniques needed to make complex electronic designs much easier to test. The initial self-published hardcover version sold for $95 (in 1978 dollars) and it was advertised in Electronics Test magazine to the small portion of electronic engineers who worked in the manufacturing test environment.  Why not in Electronic Design magazine, with its much wider audience? Because the design engineers who read that magazine didn’t have the problem, even though they were the only ones who could implement the solutions to the downstream problems.

So while the book taught design techniques, it was sold to the test people who could then use it as a lever to convince engineering and top management that the topic was important enough to warrant a book being written about it. And one that contained the tools needed to make the economic justification for designing things to be testable as well as functional.

This is but one example of using the right media selection to get the message out to the people with a problem to solve. Much more cost effective than trying to sell to the “unwashed masses.”

Comments, please. And thanks for reading.

 

Posted on

Please Use Other Door

Doors

 

How do you feel when you are about to enter a place of business and are confronted by doors that are patently unfriendly to you, the door user?

The doors on the left in the illustration are a prime example of this. If you are the business owner, why pay for two doors when only one is usable? And why is it that you as the customer are always carrying something in the hand or arm that prevents you from using the other door?

And should you push to open the door or should you pull? If both sides have handles for pulling, you’d think you should pull, right? But how many times have you run into doors where that doesn’t work? I know I’ve met those unfriendly doors many times in my life.

How complicated would it be to put a push plate on the side of the door that needs pushing to open it and a pull handle on the side that needs pulling? Or make the doors pull both ways? Or push both ways?  Is this rocket science?

What has the design of doors have to do with marketing?  A whole bunch, it turns out. You want people to be in a friendly, pleasant and receptive mood when they enter your place of business, don’t you? Of course you do. So why make them angry and frustrated with a poorly designed entrance to your store before they even get inside? Isn’t that completely counterproductive to what you are trying to accomplish?  Of course it is. So don’t do it!

If you are not a brick and mortar enterprise, is your website design and implementation just as guilty of frustrating your prospective customers as the physical doors illustrated in this post? You might want to take a second look, or have someone unfamiliar with it take a look for you. You could end up really surprised — pleasantly or unpleasantly! What about your business pages on your social media sites of choice?  Are they easy or hard to get to and/or navigate within or around? Is there some semblance of logic to the navigation paths?

Everything your business does needs to be considered in light of your marketing objectives. Don’t make yourself difficult to do business with. Because people will go elsewhere if they can’t get through your door.

Comments welcome, as always.  Thanks for reading.

Posted on

Italian Goulash

Italian GoulashIn a significant departure from what I usually post, today I am going to give you a recipe and cooking instructions for a meal that I invented from necessity in New Jersey many years ago, transported to the Bay Area and actually had a good friend from Rome, Italy, prepare when he and his wife got home. I still have the certificate from them stating that this dish, which doesn’t resemble goulash in any way, was actually prepared and very well received in Italy.

It takes some effort and a fair amount of time to make this dish, which should serve four people, but the result is nothing short of amazing.  I guarantee it and many people, including my boys and anyone else who has partaken of it, will attest to that.

Ingredients:

  • 16 oz Oscar Meyer center cut bacon
  • 16 oz Ore-Ida Fast Food French fries
  • 1 or 2 green pepper
  • 1 or 2 sweet onion
  • 8 fresh eggs
  • 2 cups grated cheddar cheese

In a large skillet:

  • Cut bacon into ½” pieces. Fry until golden brown. Remove from pan and drain on paper towel. Reserve bacon grease.
  • Cut potatoes into ½” pieces. Fry until crispy and golden brown in bacon grease. Remove from pan and drain on paper towel. Reserve remaining bacon grease.
  • Dice pepper and onion and fry in remaining bacon grease until slightly soft.
  • Add bacon bits and potatoes back into pan with medium heat. Mix thoroughly.
  • Scramble eggs and pour into pan. Stir until bacon, potatoes, peppers and onions are well coated and until eggs are almost done.
  • Add and stir in grated cheese until melted, removing pan from heat to prevent anything from burning.

Serve immediately with salt and pepper to taste and toasted sourdough bread.

You might wonder what this recipe has to do with marketing, and that’s OK. Please make this dish and comment on this post, or use the website contact form, to provide me with your opinion about it. I will then reveal the secret connection.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.  Mangia!

 

Posted on

Some Further Thoughts on Creating the Customer WOW! Experience

A few weeks ago, on July 26th to be exact, I posted a written rant about how a meeting I’d just been to was concerned not with creating an initial WOW experience for customers but instead with damage control and reputation repair.

As some colleagues and I prepare to launch a new product and set of services, we have frankly been tempted more than once to “jump the gun” and start looking for fans, connections and clients before we’re really ready. Especially since there are some upcoming large networking events where we think we could get a lot of leverage and create a lot of buzz. Think the equivalent of trade show deadline for new product introduction.

We have, and I believe properly so, decided not to jump the gun on this as you’ll hear in the video embedded in this post. Even though we know we’re going to miss more than a couple of great opportunities to promote the new stuff, we think that having the infrastructure in place to create a real WOW! experience when we do introduce is worth any small loss of prospects in the short term.

Think about it.  It takes a long time to build a great reputation. It takes a very short time to ruin one. I heard again very recently that it takes only one “dumb s**t” to wipe out ten “atta boys” and I believe it.  So we’re going to take the time needed to get it right.  Website, social media, collaterial materials, markets, messages and media combinations. Tough as it is to wait, it is the right thing to do.

After all, do we really want to send the message to our potential new markets that we don’t have the patience and professionalism to do the kind of job for ourselves that we will be promising to do for them? I don’t think so. What do you think?

Posted on

Some Results I’m Proud to Share

Today marked the first presentation of The Marketing Seminar/Workshop that I’ve been developing over the last couple of months.  We had a small but diverse group — from telecom to radio to on-line learning to association management to interior design to multi-level marketing to web-based business-to-business and business-to-consumer networking to solar energy and more — and the session was, frankly, a smashing success.

You can see how the participants rated the session’s overall quality, the content, the speaker — me — and the materials, and what some of the participants who made comments on the evaluation forms had to say. I have to say that I’m pretty proud of these ratings and comments. And I extend my sincere thanks to all of the participants. They were great.

Today’s session was priced very inexpensively — $45 early bird/ $55 regular — so that there would be enough people to get a real feel for the successful development of the content and the materials.  The next public session, which I’m planning for sometime in October, will be about twice today’s price.  Why?  Because it is worth it. And because I can’t make a living giving my expertise away at too low a cost.

Will the next session be worth that increased cost to you? I think if you look at the infographic embedded in this post you’ll agree that it is.  If not, write to me and tell me so. I’d love to hear from you.

p.s.: If you don’t want to wait until the Fall to get the benefit of participating in this session, I do offer in-company versions. :-)