Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF POSTS ON WHAT YOU CAN DO TO BE MORE SUCCESSFUL IN YOUR BUSINESS THIS YEAR. TO GET A FREE REPORT FULL OF SUCCESS TIPS FOR YOUR BUSINESS, CLICK HERE.

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I want to start of this post with a quote from The Number One Thing You Can Do to Make Your Small Business More Successful in 2010, which is a free report I compiled with over 100 business experts. This comes from Tom Shay of ProfitsPlus.org. His advice on what you need to do to be successful is this:

In a word – target. Identify the ideal customer to make sure your product /service is the right one.

Then look for additional products/services to sell to that customer. The idea is to sell 5 to the one customer as compared to selling one product/service to five customers.

Tom’s advice really got me thinking. The question I came up with is how often do we develop products then hope to find a market for them, versus finding a market and then developing products for it?

Now, I am all for following your passion and going with your gut. But at the end of the day, I think we’ll all find that it is the people in our lives that matter, not the things. So, in business, we may think it is all about our product, but it really isn’t. It is about the people we get to work with and for (our customers).

Tom’s advice is to get to know your customer. Find the one customer type that you really jive with, and then perfect your product for that ideal customer. And, instead of repeating this process with a different product and a different customer base, simply drill down and find out what else you can offer your ideal customer. It really comes down to picking a well-defined niche and living there.

I think this is really good advice. I believe that the more you can focus yourself and your business, the more successful you can be. You become more purposeful, start to take on a clear identity, and you find yourself developing a sense of community with your customers.

What do you think?

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Hello, I am Bradford Shimp. I write most of the articles here at All Business Answers. If you would like to help out, let me know. I am always happy to publish guest posts and am looking for some regular contributors.

I help small businesses develop a presence on the web via web sites and online marketing with my business, Broad River Creative.

photo credit: Orin Zebest
photo credit: barryskeates

I had a great conversation with Andy Hayes about creating a business niche. Andy runs a business called Travel Online Partners. His niche is to provide advice and services to travel agencies, mostly dealing with web sites and online marketing.

Most of what Andy offers to his niche of travel industry clients would also be useful for any type of business. He knows this, but he isn’t about to change his business model. That’s because he knows that the more focused the business niche, the better.

This is something that he learned from experience. When he was just getting started he was inclined to create a general services company. After all, he could easy help any kind of business with his skills. But then he got some advice from Naomi Dunford, who said he should only focus on one type of customer, ie. niche.

Andy told me that he was nervous to follow the advice, but he did it anyway. He didn’t know if he would be able to find enough customers if he just focused on the travel niche. Today he is glad that he took the advice.

He says that he doesn’t think there is a niche too small to focus on, and he encourages small business to narrow down their focus as much as possible while defining their niche.

There are a lot of benefits that come from having a narrow niche. Here are some them:

• Loyal and passionate customer base
• You really get to know your customers
• You can modify your product to be a custom fit for customer needs
• You can provide good content and quickly discover people interested in your niche
• You can focus on building and interacting with a community around your niche

Those are just a few of the benefits of focusing on a narrow niche. I would challenge you to look at your own business. Do you have too broad a focus? Can you identify a niche to go after from amongst your current customer base? I know I plan to work on better defining my own niche. I hope that you will as well.

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Hi there, I am Bradford Shimp, publisher and writer of this fine blog. My goal is to help small businesses succeed. I do that by providing advice at this blog and by providing web design services targeted toward small business at my company, Broad River Creative.

Have a small business question? Email it me so I can answer it on the blog.

photo credit: MagdaMontemor

Have a hard time actually following through on those new year’s business resolutions? Want some accountability in meeting your current goals? Staples, one of my favorite companies, has teamed up with another company called stickK to help you meet your goals.

The Staples stickK to it! Business Challenge is an interesting program. It is a free service for businesses, or anyone really. What it does is this:

First, you pick a category for your goal. The categories are: Get Organized and Increase Productivity, Green the Office, Improve Working Environment, Maximize the Bottom Line, and Professional Development and Marketing. Within in each of these categories is a series of goals that you can choose from. I chose to work on the Business Plan goal in Maximize the Bottom Line.

When you choose your goal, you are asked to agree to a commitment contract. The idea is to buy into the fact that you really need to achieve your goal. The deadline for all goals with this program is April 12th of this year.

Once you pick your goal, you can select a referee. Since this is a free service, you need to come up with your own referee. This should be someone who you are close to who can report on the status of your goal. You can also invite friends to support your goal. Referees and supporters will be asked to set up their own account and will be able to monitor and comment on your progress.

The experts at stickK have developed this program with your psychology in mind. They know that if you have a goal, if you have accountability for that goal, and also if there are incentives tied to meeting the goal, you are far more likely to reach said goal.

For this program, the goal must be chosen from the list provided by Staples and stickK. While this is a little limiting, there are a wide variety of choices, and you can better define each goal yourself.

The accountability is provided by your own friends and colleagues. To that end, it is important that you find people that will check the site weekly and who will stick with it. I imagine the best scenario is to team up with a friend who will have his or her own goal and then referee each other.

As for the incentives, Staples has stepped in to reward EasyPoints for hitting different aspects of your goal. For instance, sending in your weekly report on time may get you 5 EasyPoints. These points are redeemable at Staples for office products and services.

If you are looking for something a little different to help you achieve a goal, I really think you should check this program out. It takes advantage of a great system of contract, accountability, and rewards. It is a system you may want to apply to more aspects of your business. If you have employees, why not get everyone involved? You can referee and support each other. It will be a good community building experience and will help you achieve important business goals.

You can sign up for this free program at staples.com/goals. Want to monitor my goals progress? Leave a comment or email me and I will invite you to support my goal.

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Bradford Shimp helps small businesses succeed at BroadRiverCreative.com

What makes online conversation marketing via blogs, social media, and the like such a success is that it spurs interaction. Interaction can lead to many things, most importantly sales. However, for all the talk of interaction and customers gladly spreading your story for you, there is another side to the coin. While there are the conversationalists out there that will quickly build relationships with your business if you meet their needs and exceed their expectations, there are also a whole lot of listeners out there.

Listeners are quiet folk. They don’t engage nearly as much. If they get on your forums, its probably to find a specific answer to a specific problem. They aren’t commenting on your blog. They aren’t responding to your tweets. Because you don’t see the interaction, it is easy to discount the listeners, or to question if they are even there. But these people are listening. They are being impacted by the content you put out. They are just as loyal as the conversationalists. Sure, they don’t write blog posts recommending your company to everyone in the world, but that’s because they don’t have blogs. They are probably recommending you quietly to a trusted friend who they know will benefit from your business.

The quiet ones can be a hard group to connect with. If you are doing all of the right things online, but not seeing the results spring up like you wish they would, be sure to not throw in the towel too soon. The listeners outnumber the talkers, in my opinion. If you just stop blogging because you aren’t getting comments or seeing sales, you might be leaving some people out in the cold. If you have visitors to your blog, you should keep blogging. If you don’t have visitors, you should invest some time and money in education so you can be a better business blogger, but that is another story.

While you won’t get the kind of gratifying interaction on a regular basis out of the quiet ones that you will get out of the talkers, you will get great value. You get that value by consistently providing value. The listeners are the steady force behind your online efforts. They will subscribe to your newsletter and actually read it. They will attend your webinars. They will buy your products.

Chances are that they will also help you spread the word. The difference is, they won’t do it on their own, at least not on a large scale. That isn’t because they don’t love your product, its because they aren’t talkers. They do not have platforms of their own. But don’t give up on them. Connect with your regular loyal listeners and buyers. Draw them out. You can probably get some pretty amazing testimonials from them. When they send you a referral, it will likely be a dead-on qualified lead. You’ll take one of these a year over countless unqualified visits to your site or hundreds of spam followers on Twitter. The quiet ones make up in value what they don’t deliver in amount of interaction.

You’re job is to not give up on them. Keep writing your blog. Keep posting your best insights on Twitter. Keep talking, and they will keep listening. While your words won’t always trigger a response that you will see, you are planting seeds. And if you ever do find yourself in a conversation with a quiet one, you will be amazed at the depth and value there. Listeners are learners and doers. They have an important place in your online conversation marketing plans. Don’t leave them out by stopping your end of the conversation.

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Bradford Shimp helps small businesses develop online marketing plans at BroadRiverCreative.com.

Two of my favorite people on the web are Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk. They have both built powerful brands that they are leveraging into great success. Both of them provide a large amount of content on a daily basis. Both of them speak at a ton of conferences. Both of them just published a book. But here’s the thing, they are very different from each other.

Gary is high energy, over the top. His WineLibary.TV videos are fun because of how excited he gets. He’s loud, he pulls no punches, and says things just they way he sees them. His content, when it comes to business development, is of the kick in the pants variety.

Chris is more the quite type. In his videos, he talks quietly, almost whispering at times. His writing is thoughtful, as in it is designed to make you think and mull over things and figure things out for yourself. He doesn’t pull punches either, and he challenges just as much as Gary does. Yet, his is a more quiet voice.

These two guys couldn’t be more different in some ways. While one whispers, the other shouts. Yet, they are both very successful. What can we learn from that?

Here’s what I think. I think it doesn’t matter if you whisper or shout. Instead, you need to discover your own voice. Be true to yourself when engaging in conversation marketing. No one is going to be successful trying to be the next Chris Brogan or Gary Vaynerchuk. That doesn’t mean you can’t relate to people like this and use them as models. In fact, that is a very good idea. But at the end of the day, the voice you are using to spread your message had better be your own.

The other thing to learn is that it doesn’t pay to be vanilla. Embrace your quirks. You don’t need to create a persona or anything. Being yourself is your persona. If you are quiet and thoughtful, that’s okay. Chris Brogan proves that. If you are loud and boisterous, that’s okay too. Just as Gary Vaynerchuk proves. If you are anything, that’s okay. Be yourself. Its easier and better in the long run.

So what do you think about how business owners should communicate? Do you think that certain personalities have an easier time of it than others? I would appreciate your thoughts.