by admin | Nov 8, 2012 | Blog, marketing activities, Strategy
Robert Cialdini’s marketing tactics in “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” tells us you are more likely to say “yes” to someone you like. Yes, that’s common sense. It doesn’t take a marketing consultant or someone with years of sales training to tell you that. But what many haven’t mastered yet is how to have someone like you. That’s why you’ll see many people curling on a coach, watching a movie for one, or those who found their special someone may find themselves spending time trying to avoid arguments, rather than sharing a gelato masked in some fancy Italian name. It’s no wonder that How To Win Friends and Influence People became a number one on the best seller list and remained on the list for ten years straight, even outselling the bible!
The Third Face to Persuasion is the Law of Liking
We’re strongly influenced by people who we like; liking someone builds trust and you tend to believe them more often. The simple math is that we like to do business with people we enjoy being around, or feel are “just like us.” It’s about establishing rapport, which means an employee-employer relationship is more important than ever, if you want to achieve goals in the workplace. This means developing a social network within your work environment.
How likeable are you to your team and co-workers? Are you approachable, optimistic, trustworthy and a person of integrity? Psychological tactics applied by successful salespeople include mirroring – from finding common backgrounds and interests down to speech and body language. Salespeople using these tactics can build rapport to a much deeper level, improve and accelerate the sales process. We all get along with someone whose values, beliefs and assumptions match up with us (Perhaps you might even pretend to root for the boss’s footy team around grand final, but secretly hang your team’s colours around your neck and cheer for your team by a television in the basement!).
When it comes to brand building and marketing tactics, customer insight is the key to reaching this rapport. If you’re targeting teenagers, you can use the same language or jargon as them – but without looking like you’re trying too hard! Likewise, finding information on a target market can tap into a prospect or customer’s deepest hopes or fears. When it comes to choosing brands, just like we do with people, we choose those we feel most connected to, those we like more and those brands that reflect to us our beliefs and values.
Of course, another dimension is that people like others that make them feel good. The easiest and most overlooked way to do this is to compliment people. We’re all suckers for flattery so compliment when you can, but make sure you are authentic in your praise. Complimenting fulfils two of our most important needs – the need to be recognised and the need to feel loved. Praising people for their efforts will also means that you will be more appreciated and respected in the workplace, or within personal relations. Of course, this links back to the Law of Reciprocity where people are more likely to “return the favour” in the future.
What people don’t realise is that complimenting others will enhance your own well-being as well. By focusing on other people’s needs and desires, rather than on yourself, you can improve your self-esteem by perceiving yourself as a thoughtful and kind person. Likewise, complimenting will naturally lift others’ self-esteem and in turn, boost productivity.
As the need to be liked goes down to the core of the coveted feeling of belonging, it is no wonder that Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends and Influence People” is still as applicable today as it was 80 years ago.
Below is a list of his Six Ways to Make People Like You:
- Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
- Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.
- Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
- Become genuinely interested in other people.
- Smile
- Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
Perhaps nice guys can finish first.
by admin | Sep 13, 2012 | Blog
Simply because they have got their definition of what branding is completely wrong. They have pursued brand building and developed great brands, but they just don’t call the process by its correct name like brand development.
Why is this important you ask? Because then business owners will find it so much easier to find the right information and educate themselves on the stuff that can make or break their business – marketing!
Here’s a case in point.
I’m reading yet another “Secrets to Business Success” article aimed at small business owners. It’s in the My Business Magazine July 2012 edition, that reviews Mark Bouris’s (the founder of Wizard home loans and subsequently Yellow Brick Road as well as the boss in the Australian version of The Apprentice) speech and advice to the SME business owners given in May 2012.
What gets under this marketing consultant’s skin is that SME business owners are still looking for and hoping for a silver bullet, a magic pill to fix all of their problems.
So what are the secrets and advice given by one of Australia’s leading entrepreneurs especially to the SME sector?
To be fair in today’s live presentation, that I had the privilege of attending in Melbourne, Mark Bouris, a great and inspirational speaker, states that there are no secrets, but it makes for a great headline that publishers love and readers can’t get enough of – something for all entrepreneurs to keep in mind when trying to generate their own publicity.
Before I provide a summary of Mark’s speech from My Business magazine, I have to get passionate, or in Mark’s words “fight” for what I know to be true – the fact that he has inadvertently stuffed up his definition of Marketing and Branding!
As a marketing consultant, I’m amazed that someone like Mark Bouris, can in the same sentence say that “…you’ve got to have something that’s unique. It’s not about marketing and branding; these three things are really important: the idea or concept, how hard you can work and are you more skilled in your area or is your product better?”
The actual word brand is all about being unique. Branding IS differentiation. Branding is already the most misunderstood word in the business language, so having someone who is a brilliant and successful entrepreneur and marketer, someone who has the influence and mass media exposure, muddy the waters, is only contributing to the confusion faced by SMEs!
Branding is what people think and feel about when they experience your product or service. Like most business owners Mr Bouris’s definition and use of “marketing and branding” is completely wrong, in fact the 3 things he refers to ARE what marketing and branding is all about! Marketing is simply about satisfying needs not selling or promoting which is just how most business owners use these terms. In the words of Peter Drucker, businesses about two things and two things only; marketing and innovation.
Now to summarise the rest of the inspirational article.
1. Understand why you’re in business.
-Working for yourself?
-Being successful?
-Helping people?
Ultimately the question is about what drives you, what gets you out of bed in the morning?
2. Sheer hard work.
A self-confessed workaholic Mr Bouris concedes that his work habits have cost him two marriages (and a fortune in divorce settlements) and advocates that hard work is the key to being better than your competitors through ongoing improvement.
Although I agree that there is no escaping hard work, unless you enjoy it you simply will not be able to do it day in day out, and this is certainly no secret. The real secret should be to work smarter not harder and focus on the things that will make the greatest contribution to business. And it is this focus that is so damn hard to achieve for most of us, with emails and calls, and more distractions than ever before.
3. Understand what business you are really in.
This is a critical way to examine your business. Is Yellow Brick Road in the financial advice business or the mortgage business? No, that’s how they execute the actual business. Their actual business is helping people achieve their dreams and hopes. It’s the old ‘sell benefits not features’. To paraphrase Max Factor, who when asked what businesses he was is, replied by pointing to the factory and said “…in there we make creams and powders and then pointed to the street and said out there we sell hope to women.”
4. Be involved in an environment that’s a rising tide.
In other words go where the demand is, don’t try to generate it, as that’s not only to hard but also too expensive. Inventing something new and then trying to sell it to everyone is extremely hard to do.
5. Having the right culture is critical.
Without a team that is able to have fun together, take risks and stay together through good times and bad, there is no business.
6. Failures are successes too because they provide an opportunity to learn and adjust your course of action.
7. Having the right business partner, someone you can share highs and lows with, someone to bounce ideas off and to make decisions together with is critical.
I would add that having clearly defined roles will also make a partnership much more effective with each partner being in charge of a separate area will minimize disagreements.
by admin | Sep 5, 2012 | Blog
95% of the professionals on Linkedin are not realizing anywhere near it’s potential. Potential that allows you to:
- Promote your personal brand
- Be a Proactive Networker
- Check References and Backgrounds
- Look for a Job, Seek and Hire Candidates and be better prepared for interviews
- Generate Leads and Accelerate Sales
- Ask for Advice from your own network as well as “Crowdsource”
- Find Experts and Partners
- Improve your Personal Productivity with all of the different LinkedIn tools, Widgets, and Apps.
- Research trends and industries, gather opinions by running polls as well as track company news.
- Finally and most importantly, LinkedIn can provide you with the perfect and simple platform for a Referral System, which we all know, is critical to success in business.
You can read more here about WHY LinkedIn is the Greatest Personal Branding, Publicity and Sales Tool for B2B Markets here.
If you want to be a ‘power user’ and maximize your time investment into the most useful B2B Social Medium, then you’ll need to get the basics right:
1. Develop a unique profile; if your profile reads like everyone else’s then it will be much harder to stand out! Be creative, controversial, funny, but most importantly be yourself. Make sure that your profile is still considered ‘professional’ by your intended target audience; prospective employers, recruiters, prospective clients. What works in the advertising industry maybe simply too much for the banking industry.
2. Make sure you complete your profile; it’s likely to be your most public face to the world. People spend so much effort on their resume that they use intermittently yet their LinkedIn profile contains barely any information. If anything, your LinkedIn Profile should be more detailed than your resume. Today it’s absolutely fine to be an accountant by day and a fashion blogger by night. Your LinkedIn profile can easily and professionally reflect your many pursuits and passions.
3. Optimise your profile. From the way you personalize your Public Profile and Website links to optimizing your keywords to make sure you appear in searches that matter when prospects look for professionals that have your skills.
4. Develop a Company Profile and make sure your entire team connect to it. Due to the simple and free nature of LinkedIn with all of its benefits we now recommend that start ups, from consultants to trade professionals, develop a great personal and company profile, especially until such time that they can afford a website that is professional. The result is a very basic but powerful online presence, while the website is being developed.
5. Connect with clients, suppliers and prospects. Make sure you personalize the invitation and provide a reason to connect when you invite people you know or just met. Make sure you have a policy on who you connect with, your network is a reflection on you.
6. Use the LinkedIn Productivity tools: Web Browser Toolbar, Outlook Widget, Events, Polls, etc.
7. Ask for Recommendations, they are your testimonials and are vital in developing trust and credibility.
8. Participate in Groups, make sure to listen first, and add value rather than sell! Social Media is about communication and education not promotion! Success comes from helping people achieve their goals.
9. Answer questions in Answers section.
10. Build relationships, try to meet people over a coffee, pick up the phone if you are in the same geographical location.
11. Social Media is about developing unique content and then promoting it. Make sure you do both. There are multiple ways to promote your content on LinkedIn, which is why it is an amazing online PR tool!
12. Get in front of the people you need to get in front of, through correctly using the search function and then leveraging your existing relationships to make the appointment by asking for Introductions or asking the connector to forward your message to the intended recipient.
13. Test LinkedIn Mail as well as LinkedIn Advertising.
If you don’t use it, you lose it! Start with 10 minutes a day, track your progress and get LinkedIn or become Locked Out!
If you need assistance with your LinkedIn Profile, or are looking for LinkedIn Training or LinkedIn Coaching then check out http://www.influenceyournetwork.com/linkedin-training
by admin | Sep 3, 2012 | Blog
One of the most important decisions that a small business owner will make is how much money to set aside for the marketing budget.
Successful and profitable small businesses understand that they need to allocate adequate funds for marketing their business.
Prospective customers always ask, “How much should I spend on marketing?”
The answer we give them is this:
1. No matter how much you have it will never be enough! Having worked in large corporate environments our marketing consultants know that companies with $30m budgets these big brands always want more; more advertising dollars, more sponsorship dollars, more PR dollars, more salary dollars for the marketing department and the list goes on.
2. Marketing Budgets will be much higher in competitive business categories and lower in general in less competitive ones.
3. The more unique your business or product / service offering, in general, the easier it will be (and cheaper) to promote it IF you are tapping into existing demand as opposed to trying to educate the market, which will always be horrendously expensive and most small businesses just don’t have the sort of marketing budget required to do this. In these unique cases actually having new entrants / competitors may actually be a benefit as together the task of educating the market is made easier.
4. If you are the new entrant in the market, you will have to spend more to take some share away from your competitors or create new demand in the market.
Here’s a great article discussing the different criteria for setting your marketing budget http://www.imageworksstudio.com/blog/how-set-marketing-budget-your-smb/index.html and a summary for your convenience:
1. Counselors to America’s Small Business (SCORE) and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) define the variable for a proper marketing budget to be between 2% and 10% of sales, noting that for B2C, retail and pharmaceuticals can exceed 20% during peak brand building years.
2. You have to spend money to make money, yet most small businesses are completely under budgeted when it comes to their marketing. Worse still when they do spend on marketing, much of the expenditure is wasted and becomes an expense instead of an investment.
3. The article goes on to provide some guidelines based on revenue quoting an average of 4-6% and making the usual disclaimer that many circumstances can warrant an increase or reduction in your marketing budget as a percentage of revenue.
4. Looking at what your competitors are spending can be useful
5. In the end your marketing budget should be properly allocated to position your organization, trump the competition, raise awareness, generate quality conversion and of course increase revenue growth and this is the most important point and exactly how a marketing budget should be considered.
6. On the subject of organic growth – Many small businesses start out and grow their clientele by word of mouth alone and are very successful. But they usually hit a brick wall. That’s where building a powerful brand is critical. When you rely on organic growth alone, you risk losing revenue from business you did not get because a % your target audience were never made aware of your product or service! And you cannot underestimate the lost sales from those prospects who perceived your current brand negatively and left your website without you ever knowing about it. This is why it is so important to build the brand correctly. Why risk millions to save thousands?
Finally I’d like to use 3 examples we can all learn from:
1. The highly successful Real Estate Agency Hocking and Stuart entered the market by investing around 20% of the Net Sales back into marketing and became one of Australia’s most successful real estate agencies.
2. Swisse feels better by increasing its marketing budget! Millions of dollars spent sponsoring sporting events and paying high-profile celebrities to spruik its products has paid off for Swisse Vitamins, which has more than doubled its profit.
a. 131 % rise in net profit to $8.9 million for the year ended June 2011.
b. Swisse revenue climbed to $77.2m, up from $45m the year before.
c. Annual marketing expenses doubled to $26m, accounting for 94% of the total cost of sales at the fast-growing company. In contrast, market leader Blackmores, which made sales of $234m last year, spent just $22m on marketing and sales activities.
So Swisse allocated approximately 34% to marketing as a % of Total Revenue whilst Blackmores allocated only about 9.5% to marketing as a % of Total Revenue.
3. LinkedIn, the world’s biggest professional-networking website, is expected to reach around $900m in sales and marketing and sales expenditure more than doubling in the last 12 months to around $76m or 8.4% of Total Revenue in a category that sees LinkedIn play in 3 different markets with varying levels of competition:
a. Professional Networking – subscription fee model where they have little or no competition other than that of consumer attention deficit caused by every other social medium
b. Advertiser Media Dollars excluding Recruitment, which is an incredibly competitive category dominated by Google’s Adwords
c. And finally competing for recruitment advertising dollars that LinkedIn is vying for by hoping to take share away from other recruitment portals.
Regardless of your industry or stage of development “You’ll Feel Better If You Budget For Adequate Marketing Investment” and invest your marketing budget wisely!
by admin | Aug 27, 2012 | Blog
NO!
Of course a marketing consultant is not going to admit that the profession is dying as proposed by the now famous article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review blog, titled “Marketing Is Dead.”
This particular marketing consultant is certainly jealous of the controversial title of the article and the publicity it has received but has to disagree vehemently with the proposition that marketing is dead, not just to defend all marketing consultants and our profession, but because the claim is simply not true, especially when you examine the small business segment, which is yet to get a handle on the basic principles of marketing in general, let alone the more complex issues.
Firstly, lets recap the main points made by the article and then look at the so called evidence, to see whether I personally and my fellow marketing consultants in fact died on the fateful day of August 9th when this outlandish claim pronounced us dead.
Proposition 1:
Studies have confirmed that buyers are no longer paying much attention and traditional marketing communications (Traditional marketing as defined buy the author — includes advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications)
Buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, and often from sources outside the firm such as word-of-mouth or customer reviews.
Rebuttal 1:
You don’t say! Wow, we marketing consultants have had our head in the sand all this time!?
For SME’s, based on the 2011 Hubspot Study, Inbound Marketing (prospects find you; Social Media, SEO, PPC and Blogs) has a 62% lower Cost Per Lead than Outbound Marketing (Direct Mail, Trade Shows, Telemarketing).
The situation is similar at the top end of town, with more and more companies investing less and less into traditional media and more and more into online and social media marketing, where dialogue can be had with their customers and prospects.
And whether the author, Bill Lee, likes it or not, all of these in-bound efforts still need skills of advertising, PR, and marketing communication professionals, albeit skills that now need to be upgraded through ongoing professional development, but again this is nothing new, it’s called change!
Additionally, Mr.Lee needs to be reminded that ‘branding’ is not a ‘traditional marketing communication’, but the result of them. Here are 2 articles on ‘what is branding’ – the most misused and misunderstood term in business today!
http://www.qubepartners.com/blog/and-then-there-was-brand
http://www.qubepartners.com/blog/what-is-a-brand-in-the-words-of-a-few-good-men
Proposition 2:
Studies show that CEOs have lost all patience with marketers and say they lack business credibility and the ability to generate sufficient business growth, are tired of being asked for money without explaining how it will generate increased business, and are sick of all the talk about brand equity that can’t be linked to actual firm equity or any other recognized financial metric.
Rebuttal 2:
Marketers are losing out to the bean counters in the boardroom, however assuming brand equity can not be linked to organisational success, which it actually can be:
http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap and
http://www.interbrand.com/en/best-global-brands/Best-Global-Brands-2011.aspx
the CEO’s and their distinguished consultants do not have anything to replace the old world marketers with!
Additionally, and especially after the spate of recent global meltdowns, everyone is questioning the value of these overpaid CEO’s. So who cares what they think? Let them like sheep cut their marketing budgets which they regularly do during every economic downturn and they can then watch their competitors who keep investing into marketing pass them by:
1. A number of studies conducted since WWII showed something that marketers have known all along – keep marketing through the downturn. The following quote is from Professional Marketing, Oct-Dec 2008 – article titled “All Hands On Deck”: “…companies that increased marketing spend (relative to market size) during a recession, increased their return on capital employed by 5% in the recovery, compared to a 1% decline for the budget cutters”
2. Recent UK research, “Values of Design FactFinder by the Design Council” has shown that:
- Rapidly growing businesses are nearly six times as likely as static ones to see design as integral.
- Shares in design-led businesses have outperformed the FTSE 100 by more than 200% over the past decade.
- For every £100 a design alert business spends on design, turnover increases by £225.
- Businesses that add value through design see a greater impact on business performance than the rest.
And design is an integral part of the brand communication process, the very process that Bill Lee proclaims as a dead discipline.
Proposition 3:
In today’s increasingly social media-infused environment, traditional marketing and sales not only doesn’t work so well, it doesn’t make sense, because organization hires people — employees, agencies, consultants, partners — who don’t come from the buyer’s world and whose interests aren’t necessarily aligned with his, and expects them to persuade the buyer to spend his hard-earned money on something.
Rebuttal 3:
This one is the simplest proposition to shoot down. Obviously the problem is not hiring the right marketing people! Part of being a good marketer is the ability to get into people’s minds and hearts. Regardless of whether the marketing consultant is a user of the product or service they are promoting, the value of a marketing consultant is to be able to see challenges from the customer perspective and bring new solutions to the problem. If Apple asked their customers to design an MP3 player and a new phone they may have ended up with better products rather than the revolutions that were the iPod and iPhone. Great marketers have been able to give something of value to customers that customers didn’t even know they wanted.
The author then proposes solutions that every marketing consultant would certainly agree with as they have always been the backbone of successful marketing such as building passionate communities or tribes around your brand, targeting customer influencers, looking after VIP’s and assisting them to become advocates.
Marketing is evolving!
In conclusion, let’s put things in perspective – Marketing is not dead or dying, it like most other professions has some problems in the board room, but at least we don’t have a problem of image in the bedroom, as marketing is still seen as a sexy profession, albeit probably for all the wrong reasons.
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