A Marketing Coach; Why you may need one?

The purpose of a coach:

First, let’s take a look at the function of a coach in general. According to dictionary.com a coach is a person who trains and instructs another, as in an athlete, singer or actor. But, the definition is more than that. All of the really famous and memorable coaches were also great motivators. Therefore, it is fair to say that a marketing coach is a person who trains, instructs and motivates one in marketing.

When looking at coaching in athletics, the function of a coach is to keep an eye on the game, whatever that may be and, to see outside and beyond the heat of the competition. Players are caught up in the game and a coach is watching from a sideline vantage to see all that is going on. The coach can see things that the player misses and can make suggestions that will help the player adjust his or her game in a way that will make winning easier. Likewise the coach can offer encouragement when it is needed to urge the player to participate harder; this is where motivation comes in. It does not stop there however; a coach also helps the player be more accountable for execution of skills necessary for the game. It is obvious that even with the most seasoned professional athletes a coach is still necessary. The reason is that the coach can see the needs of the team and help direct the players to work together with strategies meant to win. Without a coach it is easy for the players to become obsessed with their own skills and situation at the expense of the performance of the team as a whole. A coach can spend time studying the latest skills and methods and become an expert instructor that helps the natural athlete improve his or her skills. It is obvious that there are many reasons that coaches and coaching are imperative to successful athletics. The examples could go on for many paragraphs but I think the point has been made.

A marketing coach:

Now let’s look at a marketing coach. A marketing coach can gain knowledge of your current situation, what you are doing to market your business now and, can begin to make suggestions for ways that you can improve your marketing efforts very similar to the way the athletic coach does. A coach can research best practices around your industry and help you implement those best practices which can add to your revenue. A coach is not in the heat of the game so to speak, that is, not in the day to day struggles and accomplishments of your business routine and, can see things that are obvious to an outside view but difficult to see from within. A marketing coach can offer motivational support to be certain that correct habits are being built. During my sales management and coaching days, I found that much of the time, sales people would revert back to their ways of comfort after learning new techniques that improved the selling skills even when they improved sales, because it is easier to go back to something familiar than it is to develop new habits. A marketing coach can provide the accountability necessary to ensure that new practices are implemented. A marketing coach sees the big picture and is aware of techniques that are working for others that you may not be aware of. Finally a marketing coach can provide this kind of support in a relatively short time, that is, from one or two hours per week to one to two hours per month. In short, it is a very affordable way to impact your revenue.

You can find a coach at rijMarketing

Building your brand; How is it developing?

In reading the book, Conversations With Marketing Masters, by Laura Mazur and Louella Miles it occurred to me that each of us, especially with the web as it is now, are in the process of building our brands. All of these marketers spoke of building personal and corporate brands. It used to be that when one thought of brands and brand awareness that you automatically thought of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran or Honey Nut Cheerios, Budweiser Beer, or Coca Cola. Brand building was most obvious on Television, Radio and in the News Paper and when one thought of the term brand they generally thought of large national brands that had become everyday household names.

Of course the term brand originated with cattle branding. One would put the name or symbol of the ranch on cattle by burning a brand into the hide and would thereby show who owned the animal when they ran on the open range. A brand was the way to separate and identify. In marketing the term has come to mean the identification of a company, person or product. For example, corporations with famous and trusted brand names make sure that they include the corporate name in the product or service name.

When you stop to think about it, even before the internet, (are there any readers that remember that time?), in small towns across America, companies and people were known for their brands. A local hardware would be known through out the county, for example Smith’s Hardware Supply…. and along with that went a connotation about the business. It may have been that Mr. Smith was noted for having a large inventory so that you could find anything you needed or, it may have been that he was always ready to give you tips on doing projects…but whatever it was it was a brand that was known by many people in the community. It was not thought of as a brand and was not described that way but, still it was a brand. Along with the identifying name of the business went spoken and unspoken understandings that were built up over a long period of business experience. That very simply is a brand.

You see where this is going…right? Today, with access to the internet and all of the social media websites, yahoo groups, blogs, company and personal websites, people and companies are building brands every day. This brings up the title of this post and the question in it. What is your brand and how is it developing? Is it developing in ways that set you apart as a trusted advisor, the go to person? …or is it developing the idea that you are a spammer, shallow with little to offer? You can decide. You are in control of the content that you offer and the methods that you use. Remember that once you have begun to develop a brand it is very difficult to change. First impressions are lasting impressions all too often.

This is why it is necessary to take it slowly and, I am preaching to myself as much as to others. Using social media to build your own personal brand awareness is an endeavor that should take a lot of thought and time. In fact, I cannot think of a single thing that would be more important. Make sure that when you participate you are offering something that has value to someone…you’re building your brand after all.

You can always reach me at rijMarketing

SMART and SWOT; Two ways to stay focused

Large corporations often use academic style tools to improve their processes and it should be even more important to small businesses. These big companies have such a large pool of customers and opportunities that there is actually greater room for error without noticeable effect and yet, large corporations are far more inclined to fine tune through analytics than small businesses are. Let’s face it, small business owners are time strapped and often too busy just trying to tread water, especially in tougher economic times. So let me remind you of some little things that you can do that will help you and your employees regain focus.

Most all motivational speakers and self help experts emphasize the idea that goal setting is critical to achieving success. It helps you focus your efforts and, focus after all, is a key ingredient to success. This is where SMART goals come in. But, before we look at SMART goals, let’s take a look at another acronym, SWOT analysis. The reason is that doing a SWOT analysis is a great way to think about discovering and framing your goals. The SWOT analysis is a way of examining where your company is functioning at a specific time. It allows you to view your strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats at a specific moment in time and, then, you can build your goals around further development of your strengths, ways to overcome your weaknesses, becoming strategically aware of your opportunities, and thinking about how to minimize your threats. A SWOT analysis can easily be set out in a four cube matrix. In the upper quadrants you list your strengths and weaknesses and in the lower two quadrants you list your opportunities and threats. Once you have analyzed the situation and have a clear understanding of it, you can then begin to formulate your goals.

This is where SMART goals kick in for you. The acronym stands for goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and, time framed. In other words, these are goals that will cause a change if met and, further to the point, they are goals that can be met. First, they should be specifically designed to improve on the situation as lined out in your SWOT analysis. They should be goals that specifically deal with each of the four quadrants. Secondly, they should be goals that you can measure, a certain number of new customers, or a goal of additional revenue. Next they must be achievable that is, goals that you can really achieve and then they must also be realistic; in other words, goals that you are likely to achieve if you apply yourself to them. Finally, they must be goals that have a deadline; goals achieved within a specific time frame.

Now that you have done this exercise, it is important that you make sure that every employee is aware of their part in achieving these goals. The more they buy into the idea the more likely you are to achieve the success you want.

Remember:

SWOT analysis

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Threats

 And…

SMART goals:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic and Relevant
• Time Bound.

If you are an individual that would benefit from a coach, someone who will hold you accountable to implement these ideas don’t hesitate to contact me. rijMarketing.

Successful B2B Marketing and Business Development; Become a Trusted Advisor; Part I

Here is some advice for business to business service businesses, i.e., professional business services. If you want to gain more customers you must be viewed as a trusted advisor. Large corporations are finding that they have to use consultative sales techniques to win business. The days of the adage “the three most important aspects of sales are close, close and close” are over. This is especially true with the advent of web 2.0 marketing and sales. There is a great book on the market entitled Spin Selling by Neil Rackham, and while it has been around for a while, it is gaining ground in influencing sales and business development departments in companies large and small. Neil advocates consultative selling….in other words, establishing your self and your company as a trusted advisor.

Briefly, Spin Selling is a style of selling that takes the emphasis off presentation and closing and puts it on discovery of needs. It achieves this discovery with four types of questions, thus the acronym SPIN. It stands for Situation, Problem, Implication and Needs-Payoff questions that are designed to discover pain/problems and lead the prospect to the logical conclusion of a solution that becomes increasingly self evident. In order for this to work properly, the seller has to establish him/herself as a trusted authority who understands the prospects pain and likewise the solution to it.

So how do you establish yourself as a trusted advisor? The answer is made easy with web 2.0 and the social media. The first way that I would suggest is to publish a blog that offers helpful information to the market that you seek to serve. If you maintain a blog that offers at least forty articles a year, (I think more is better) that publishes information that is beneficial to your market segment you have gone a long way toward becoming a trusted advisor. If you don’t have time to write articles all the time, you can find writers that will take your topics, use your research and information and will write your articles for you. I think that you can find writers that will give you quality at an affordable price.

You can use FaceBook, LinkedIn, and twitter to establish yourself as a trusted advisor also. A great way to do it is by sharing blog and news articles that you happen across in your daily web activity. They can be written by others and, you show yourself as a trusted advisor by the articles that you choose to share. It is all about presenting value to people. If I use myself as an example, I can assure you, that even when I spell out how to do things in marketing…making it possible for one to do it on their own, the truth is that many people are too busy to do it themselves and will then call on me to do it for them and, they choose to do that because they see me as a trusted advisor an expert.

In part two of this article I will discuss how to create an offer that will open the door to becoming a trusted advisor.

What's Your Definition of Small Businesses

According to the SBA's Table of Business Size Standards a small business is defined on the average as a business that has 500 to 1,500 employees. There are a few categories where the size is as low as 100 employees but on the average, the size is 500 employees. While I can understand and appreciate that the above mentioned businesses are small in global or even United States standards; are they really small? Are they small compared to the companies that are the backbone of our entrepreneurial spirit in the US? I think that businesses that employ 5 to 25 people are truly small businesses and deserve to be in a class of their own. It is to this group of businesses that I am writing.

I believe that these small businesses, i.e., really small businesses, need to have more attention paid to their needs, especially in marketing. This is particularily true for small businesses that are offering business to business services. I have been calling into these types of businesses for several years, and it seems like they are increasingly growing more and more skeptical when approached by someone offering services or products over the  phone. The feeling seems to be that they are inundated with various marketing ploys and have been the victims of predators promising the sky and delivering a ditch. In short, this makes it difficult for these small businesses to receive the help that they need.

So then, what are some of their needs? Well, first off they need to be able to get their message out to people who are in need of their services. To use a tired cliche phrase, they need to fish were the fish are. This means that the techniques that these small business owners need to use are the same ones used by larger corporations. They need to adopt a strong web 2.0 strategy which includes SEO for local searches, social media marketing, especially with reviews on local directories. Whenever one of their customers/clients compliments them, they need to have them put the compliment on a directory like yelp. I am convinced that as time goes forward, web 2.0 marketing will become more and more important, and yet, I saw a study the other day that stated that 62% of these small business owners do not even have a website. As more and more people research products and services on the internet, it will become increasingly critical to have a web presence that impacts revenue.

How can we marketeers help? I believe that it will be by offering scalable, affordable marketing assistance; by providing the opportunity for free discovery so that these small business owners can get an appraisal of services without an obligation and that they can get actionable solutions that will meet their marketing needs.

Small Businesses Can and Should Leverage Web 2.0 and Social Media Marketing Strategies

The buzz these days is all about social media, blogging, tweeting, and Web 2.0 marketing strategies. Many large corporations are including these techniques in their everyday marketing efforts. It produces great results because the leads that are generated are warm leads, that is, they are people who are actually interested in purchasing or, at the very least researching what they are offering. In fact, it is revolutionizing the way companies market their goods and services.

Here is the interesting thing. This is largely the result of people taking their own personal consumer buying habits and carrying them to the workplace. The fact is that most people do almost all of their research and a lot of their buying on the internet. If large corporations are seeing the benefits of these marketing techniques, how much more should small businesses benefit from this as well? This is true whether your business is B2B or B2C. It is a must when other media marketing efforts are so costly and many times do not deliver the wanted and needed results. Let’s face it the internet is a formidable force in today’s marketing and advertising

The problem too often is that small business owners do not have the time, the resources or, the capital to spend a lot of effort in this area. The result is that many consumers end up purchasing from the big box organizations or online. What I am saying is that small business owners are missing out on a lot of potential business. There are ways however, that the small business owner can capitalize on this trend. To do this, they need to have their website optimized for search engines; they need to be listed in the local search results of Google, yahoo and other search engines; and, they need to be talked about on the social media networks. I know you’re saying to yourself easier said than done right?

Well, the truth is that there are small business marketing consultants that can help with this and it may surprise you how affordable it can be. I know of a company, Net5Marketing.com that does just that. They will get you seen (on the internet) get you talked about (in the social media) and get you results in additional business. The great thing about this is that it will begin to produce warm leads…real customers that really want your goods and services. It is very cost effective marketing and makes good sense in the long run.

Small Business Marketing Plans; Do One Annually

I think it is good advice to avoid clichés; however, occasionally we should throw caution to the wind and revitalize an old cliché. I am going to do that right now. No one seems to know where to credit this quote but I will use it anyway. “Those who fail to plan can plan to fail.” This is just as true for the small business woman or man and maybe more true for him or her. This article is geared toward the small business person, the entrepreneur that has from one to thirty employees. I realize that businesses that have upwards to five hundred employees can be considered small businesses and while this is true for them also, it is targeted at small local businesses; especially small business to business and business to consumer service businesses. This ranges from the local contractor, IT service provider or accountant, to the local attorney, engineer or chiropractor…and it is not just failing to plan business wise in general, these businesses should do marketing plans on an on going basis. 

This plan should be somewhere between a formal five page document and Jay Levinson’s seven sentence marketing plan. Don’t get me wrong, Guerilla Marketing is a great book and the seven sentence marketing plan is a must but, I am suggesting that the plan be a little more formal and a little more detailed. Furthermore it should be shared with every person who plays a role in the business. One of the most important parts of this marketing plan should be a one sentence position statement. This should be the ideal of what you want to accomplish for your clients or customers. A good template for this sentence would be as follows; Name of your company is a ____________ firm dedicated to __________ __________ __________. When you fill in the blanks it should send a message to your prospective customer that says “they have what I need.” In fact everyone connected with your business should have the position statement memorized so that they can recite it every time they get a chance.

You can go on the web and find many marketing plan templates and marketing plans that you can use as a guide and, while you are at it, use your common sense. Don’t include a section just because it is there. Make sure that it has actionable steps that can be understood by all of the people connected with your success. That is the key word here; actionable. The reason is that it will take actions to reach your goals.

Finally, keep it flexible. It should be a fluid document that you can update with any situation that may arise in your market climate. Be always watching and evaluating your competition and continually creatively find ways to set your self apart. It may mean that you have to offer something new so the marketing plan can change; no expect that it will change. Hopefully I have inspired, nudged, cajoled you into starting a new plan today. Do it even if you are merely restating a plan that has been working for a long time.