Entries Tagged 'Marketing' ↓

John doesn’t have time to be the webmaster; he’s busy working with clients. We can’t afford to spend much on outsiders, but the website needs regular updating. When a prospect looks at the website I want them to see the right things. What should we do?

Thoughts of the Day: Make sure you have a good structure. Keep it simple. Have an overall plan of what you want to accomplish. Lay out a schedule. Know what you’re good at, and where you need help.

Evaluate your website overall. Is it consistent? Can you add content easily? Is there a clean look and feel? If you’re not sure, spend a little money, get a professional evaluation. It’s liking having a good foundation for a house – so much easier to expand and remodel.

Start with spring cleaning! There’s probably old content on your website that could be deleted or updated. Streamline!

Invite readers to explore, but don’t try to put all the answers out there. Leave visitors with questions, so they have a reason to contact you. Find the balance between enough information to “hook” visitor, and not so much that they go away knowing everything they need to know, having no need to get in touch with your company.

Look critically at the way you display content on the website. Do you have the right concepts? Would a picture reduce the number of words you need? What’s the point you’re trying to get across – and how clear is that point?

Ask your customers and prospects what they think of the website. Listen carefully. Do they quickly identify with the message? Can they easily find what they need? Are they likely to contact you as a result of a website visit?

It’s impossible to update a website all at once. One of the mistakes I’ve often made is making a small project into a big one. Be willing to make incremental progress with the website. After all, a website is always a work in progress, it’s never done.

Make a list of the changes you’d like to make to the website. Identify priorities and group by type. Work on one area of need at a time – design, copywriting, strategy – and accomplish several items at once.

Decide how much you can afford to spend on a monthly or quarterly basis. Scale your projects to fit your budget. Budget time as well as money. Lay out a plan to work on the website regularly using a mix of outsiders and internal resources.

Perhaps you decide one quarter you want to work on updating content. Decide if anyone in your company has the skill to do copywriting. If you have a candidate, ask them to take a look at the existing content and make recommendations.

Don’t throw the whole website at them. Just ask for some ideas – what they might suggest for revisions. See what they come up with. If you like what they suggest, keep going. If not, consider hiring a copywriter.

Next month, let’s say you want to work on design. Any good designers in your company? If not, save your pennies until you can afford to hire someone good. Who’s good? Take a look at other websites. Find ones that you like the look – find out who designed those. See what else those designers have in their portfolio.

Whether you use internals, or outside vendors, it matters who you select to work on the  website. They create the face of your company. Take your time, experiment, choose carefully.

Now, back to the problem of John. You’re right, John has a full time job in the company, and it has nothing to do with website design and development. Figure out where John is most valuable to you. Schedule projects around John’s slow periods. Hire vendors who compliment what John can do, to work on the website when he’s busy.

Looking for a good book? Content Strategy for the Web, 2nd Edition, by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach.

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We wasted a lot of time and effort putting on a marketing event that didn’t produce the results we expected. Our marketing partners invited some of their clients and contacts, but they seemed to be all wrong for us. We didn’t get the sales results we needed. Help!

Thoughts of the day: Marketing events can be costly in terms of time and effort, as well as cash outlay. Getting the right people in the room starts with having the right marketing partners. Done right, marketing events can build depth in the pipeline, boost sales results and build enthusiasm among your sales people. Perfect a marketing model that you can repeat.

Lay out goals for the event you want to build. Make sure the outcome justifies the hard and soft costs. Before trying an event on your own join forces with another, experienced organization. See how they pull off a successful event. Carefully select marketing partners for their match to your target market.

Budget the time needed to prepare for a successful event. Build a checklist of activities, and a schedule of what has to happen by when. Start with categories: marketing partner selection, attendee list, room and meal details, presentation. Build out duties in each of the categories.

Brainstorm a list of potential partners. Develop a questionnaire to interview partners for fit. Check references on partners’ past performance. Here are five critical questions to ask before making final marketing partner selection:

• Do they call on the same prospect base, including types of industries, geography, size of client, level of contact?
• Can they demonstrate past results pulling prospects and clients into a room for a presentation?
• Are they committed to pulling their weight on this event?
• Who will be in charge on their side, and has this person done this before?
• Do they have similar values, in terms of client quality?

Set ground rules and confirm partners are ready, willing and able to participate.

Plan the target audience: assemble a list of invitees, build an invitation with a call to action, gather emails, send out invites, call targets to encourage participation, call to confirm attendance, assign follow up post-event.

Room details and presentations need their own checklists. Need help? Give us a call. We’d be happy to share!

Put someone in charge of weekly check up on the planning details. If you delegate activities to your marketing partners, be sure to have a weekly conference call. Verify everyone’s on track with their assigned duties.

Putting together a strong group of marketing partners, all committed to making the event a success means you can hit a home run in sales. It’s like having instant referrals. When someone else’s clients and prospects hear and see an implied endorsement of your products or services through a joint presentation, they are already connected and likely to open the door to your company.

Build a theme that ties all of the presenters together. If your company is the only one to present, be sure to give your marketing sponsors time to introduce themselves. Recognizing each other helps the audience get comfortable with the connections between you and your marketing partners and increases buy-in to implied referrals.

Make sure your sales people are primed and ready to do their best at gathering leads during the event. Familiarize them with the list of attendees. Set goals – who plans to meet with whom.

After the event focus on adding qualified prospects to the pipeline and getting new sales deals. Remember to follow up with existing clients to assess expansion opportunity. Consider a post-event mailer to people who missed the event. Ask for referrals to add to the invite list for the next event.

Once you figure out your company’s event model, plan to repeat regularly. Plugging in new marketing partners and new topics gets easier with repetition. Set up a calendar of topics to present on during the year. Schedule a 60-90 day planning cycle for each event.

Looking for a good book? The Complete Guide to Successful Event Planning with Companion CD-ROM, revised, 2nd Edition, by Shannon Kilkenny.

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Assign someone the job of being your assistant coach. Meet regularly. Review results. Define your goals and agree on what to test. Roll out ideas that deliver in practice sessions, see how they work in the real world. Don’t quit after one try.

When it comes to budget, spend what you can afford. Split the budget between tried and true initiatives, new projects that you’ve tested and know they’re ready for prime time play, and some that are your “farm team” because you’re still experimenting to see if they can work.

Remember that some teams have bigger player budgets than others, and that doesn’t always equate to results. If your budget is small, you’ll need more low cost players – focus on the internet and marketing activities your current staff can implement. Check with industry based peer groups on what works for them. Cut down on expensive trials by adopting programs others have tested.

Your marketing payoff ratio is defined as marketing expenses divided by revenue and also divided by gross profit. To prove marketing efforts are delivering, you want to see the cost of marketing drop, in relationship to revenue and gross profit. Your marketing budget stays steady from year to year, as you change around your “players”, your marketing initiatives.  Your marketing spend : revenue ratio drops as proof that your marketing efforts are working.

Looking for a good book? Introduction to Marketing Concepts by Graeme Drummond.

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Looking for suggestions on the best ways to make new connections with more  business people. Have to get ready for next year’s sales, and I don’t have enough in my pipeline yet to be comfortable. Feel like things are turning up and people are more open to buying and making connections, but I need to meet more people fast.

Things are turning up, but slowly. It may take twice as much energy as it did in the past to build the right connections with new prospects and referral sources. It’s worth mentioning that in most situations, people do business with people they know and like. How you go about making connections, and getting people to help you because they like and respect you, your firm, and what you stand for, will go a long ways towards making 2012 a banner year. Having a process for making connections will help, too.

Be prepared to be out there, more than ever. Realistically assess your situation. What time of day works best – morning, afternoon, evening? How many times per week can you go to functions. Who else could take over some of your other duties, to free you up to do more events.

Give yourself time to get ready, look over the roster of attendees, arrive early. Be prepared to be curious and enthusiastic. Offer to help other people make connections, and then ask them to do the same for you.

Set goals, such as number of events / month. Figure out how many new connections you want to make each month, as well as a goal for new appointments to talk about business. Then measure your progress towards those goals.

Look at every networking event as an opportunity – and then critically assess the opportunity. If you haven’t been to a group’s networking events before, before you go, ask some questions of the event organizer:

• Who typically attends? Is your target market being described?
• What kind of time and energy is devoted to making new connections?
• Who would be available to introduce you around?
• Is there a follow up system to connect attendees afterwards?
• How do people who attend rate the events?

If people are attending from the companies you want to connect with, ask another question: Are attendees in the positions you want to meet, or can they get you to those positions? For example, you may attend an IT networking function, but if you’re looking to connect with Human Resources personnel, or Finance, or CEO’s, you might be out of luck. Unless, of course, you can connect with the IT folks and turn that into an introduction to the people you ultimately want to meet.

Give off a good impression of your firm. What has your company been doing lately that might be interesting to other people? How can you use the resources of your company to help other people accomplish their goals? What can you do to create good will that you can trade on later?

When you go to networking events, be clear about what you’re looking to accomplish. Start out with a list specific to that event. Looking to meet one person who could tell you about . . . , introduce you to . . . , help you open a door at . . .

Use networking events to find out what makes people tick. What’s important to the people you meet? What do they care about? How can you connect to that, so that you become more memorable in their world?

Be sure to follow up with you get back from the event. Send emails, make phone calls, join up on LinkedIn. If you offered to make a connection, or send information, get it done.

Think long term. If you go to 1 networking event / week throughout the year, and you get 2-3 good connections, on average, per event, you’ll have 150 people added to your network. if you ask each of those 150 people to introduce you to 2-3 people, you’re up over 500 introductions in no time.

Looking for a good book? Great Connections: Small Talk and Networking for Businesspeople by Anne Baber.

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Big competitors are showing up in our space more frequently. On a recent proposal, we didn’t match price. We lost the account. It can’t come to price wars, because we can’t afford the losses. How do we compete?

When under attack, shift from defense to offense. Focus on your best customers. Sell solutions that help your customers grow. If you do cut prices, don’t confuse the marketplace about your company’s pricing intentions.

Avoid price wars – they’re bad for everyone involved. Customers focus on pricing and overlook product or service differences. Vendors cut back on research and product development. Innovation goes out the window, and the whole industry falls behind.

While the customer wins for a short while with a price war, eventually supply dries up. The weakest competitors go out of business. The remaining vendors pick up additional work, but can’t, or won’t, ramp up. As supply dries up, the most demanding customers with the lowest prices get cut off.

Be on the lookout for signs of increased competition. Ask your sales and field service people to keep you informed about who they’re running into and what others are offering. Look for customers who are switching to something different to save money. Watch out for competitors who combine products and services into a volume discounted price bundle – the more the customer orders, the more the customer saves. That’s often how prices wars start.

Develop a competitive matrix. Include top accounts, top sales people, typical offer, typical price, geography, annual volume, number of employees, other products and services offered, strengths and weaknesses. Discuss recent threats, and ways to counter, at sales meetings. If you are under attack, consider interviewing their sales people to find out what they’re up to.

Allow yourself react time if a customer or prospect asks you to lower prices. Request written details of competitors’ offers. Evaluate if customers are being offered something comparable, or if the customer is getting less as prices drop. Find out about quantity, quality, delivery timeframes, add-ons, surcharges for everything from fuel to customer service, etc. When a vendor cuts prices it usually cuts corners, puts limits on what’s included, and charges extra for just about everything.

In a down market, competition can be stiff. Your company’s job is to go after as much work as makes sense, at price points that allow you to make a profit. Select who you compete with.

Keep your biggest competitors busy going after second-rate business. Instead of walking away from bids, submit enough to make them struggle. Send them the low-grade accounts that you don’t want.

Target your weakest competitors by profiling their customers. Go after their quality accounts. Let them have the bottom feeders.

Go after competitors with only a few accounts in your target market. They may lack expertise or scope, and be easy pickings. Offer their customers a short term incentive to try your services – such as expedited delivery, or an extra service at no additional charge for a limited time.

Get to know your best customers. How does your product or service help them compete at what they do? How will a quality job by your company turn into your customers being able to charge more, or make more profit?

Focus on the best quality prospects and customers, for your company. Identify what you do best, and who is most likely to get the best value from your company’s experience. Team up with customers to go after opportunities together. Use your company’s skill at competitive intelligence gathering to help your customers gain market share. Help them to grow, and you grow.

If you believe it’s absolutely necessary to reduce prices, be careful. Set up a different brand, with a different product definition and price point. Offer a one time discount for new customers, and tell existing customers you’re doing that in order to build volume so that you can hold the line on everyone’s prices. Give existing customers a discount if they bring in new opportunities that help you grow your business.

Looking for a good book? The 1% Windfall: How Success Companies Use Price to Profit and Grow, by Rafi Mohammed.

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Reports are that my industry is down in revenue versus last year. Not much of a surprise there! Our sales are off, too, compared to last year. My question is this. What should I expect out of my company.

What you expect from your company, your clients, and your staff will speak volumes about how well your company weathers this market cycle. Reality is that there’s probably not enough business opportunity to go around in most industries. To push revenue up in a down market, everything needs to be in good shape.

Healthy growth for any business is in the range of 10% – 15% year over year growth. Anything less, and the company will be challenged to stay ahead of inflation and build reserves and resources to fuel future growth and development. Without money this year to put towards growth and reserves, the company will run into trouble down the road.

During this year, as in every year, there will be winners, losers, and those companies that are just holding on. This happens in every industry. The losers give up clients, revenue and profit to their more nimble competitors. The companies that are just holding on, hoping for a better year, are often fooling themselves into trouble, as they avoid dealing with the weaknesses inside their companies and their industry.

Looking at overall GDP growth of 3%  or less, it’s easy to calculate that achieving 10% – 15% year over year growth means your company will have to grow faster than the economy overall. Many industries are flat, or down this year, or experiencing anemic growth. That doesn’t mean that you should accept the industry norm.

Every year some companies grow, and some decline. GDP is a measure of overall economic growth, taking into account companies that gain market share and companies that lose ground. An individual company growth rate of 10% – 15% exceeds annual GDP in both up and down markets.

How does that happen? Keep in mind that in every 10 year cycle, 3 out of 4 businesses fall away. Business flows away from one company, goes to another company. To stay healthy, your company’s sales numbers need to be on the growth rather than the decline side of the equation.

Setting your company on a course to grow means focusing primarily on sales and marketing. Don’t make the mistake that many business owners make, of thinking that if you build an excellent product or service, the sales will just roll in. That’s unlikely to happen in this kind of an economy.

Companies that will succeed to a higher than average degree, especially in a constrained economy, will do 3 things right. They understand what kind of business opportunity they want to chase. They measure and manage results, adjusting plans regularly to continue to improve top and bottom line results. They focus on continuously improving know how related to sales and marketing.

So what can your company do?

• assess your customers: are they profitable, are they growing, do they respect what your company does for them; are your people steadily bringing in more of the same
• assess sales results: did the company produce growth last year in the 10% – 15% range, can it do that again this year; what areas are up / down
• check for weaknesses in sales and marketing: are you touching more prospects than ever before; is the lead in-flow increasing, is the conversion rate on prime customers holding steady or improving

Look at every stage of the pipeline, from suspects that fit minimum core criteria, to ones that are hearing about your company. Look at the number of prospects engage in a dialog, prospects with qualified needs and a budget, proposals sent out confirming your company’s offer, and closes. Are the numbers up at every stage? Is the increase enough to net 10% – 15% growth this year?

If any stages are down, ask why? How much do different stages have to accelerate in order to hit that 10% – 15% growth goal by year end?

Looking for a good book? Breakthrough Marketing Plans: How to Stop Wasting Time and Start Driving Growth by Tim Calkins.

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