Archive for October, 2008

Do you believe me when I tell you that your small business should be marketing in a recession? 

Maybe.  Maybe not. 

It depends on how well you know and trust me.  If you are new to reading my blog, you might think, “Yeah right. Of course you want me to be marketing.  You’re selling marketing services.  Sheesh….” But if you know, like and trust me BEFORE I tell you you should be marketing in a recession, you are much more likely to trust my advice.  

TRUST is a major component of any decision.  Read Stephen M. R. Covey’s “The Speed of Trust” for a much deeper illustration of this principle.  Anyone marketing and selling for a small business – especially in professional services – needs to pay attention to building credibility, not just bringing in leads.  It is extremely difficult to build trust just by telling people they should trust you.  You need to SHOW them they should trust you.  How do you SHOW trust?

1.  Show studies, statistics, measurements.  If I show you that - “According to a study by the American Business Press of the 1974-75 recession, companies that did NOT cut their marketing budget increased sales by 200% two years later, a fourfold difference over those who did cut their budget.”  – I’m backing up what I’m saying with numbers.  You can go read the study results for yourself, and know that I’m not making it up.  Here’s one PDF from Create-Demand.com called Marketing in a Recession.

2.  Don’t believe your own press – or at least don’t expect others to believe it.  When I hear someone say (about themselves) that they are a trusted advisor or similar self-serving talk, I can’t help but smile and think about Garrison Keillor’s ficticious town of Lake Wobegon, where “all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average.”  (Can you tell I grew up in MN?!) The point is that we all think that we’re above average, but 50% of us are wrong.

3.  Get others to say it for you.  Case studies, testimonials and referrals are powerful tools for building credibility.   Now more than ever you should be working to create enthusastic customers, and bringing in leads through referrals.  A third party voice is much powerful than your own.  Even been persuaded to buy something from an Infomercial?  Those infomercial marketing pros know exactly how to tug at your heart strings and purse strings using the power of the testimonial.

Now get out there and get marketing!  Use these credibility-building tips to boost your trust factor.  These tips will help you shorten your sales cycle and increase your lead-to-sales conversion ratio. 

P.S.  John Jantsch just sent me this offer:  For those of you who want to learn from the best, Michael Gerber and John Jantsch are running a marketing retreat up in Sonoma County November 13th and 14th.  As a Duct Tape Marketing Coach, I can offer you a 25% discount if you use purchase code EBMK1108 by midnight Monday, October 27th.  http://www.e-myth.com/seminars/ducttapemarketing/ If you decide to go, send me an email, (Email Adrianne Machina) and maybe I’ll shoot up there and join you for the marketing workshop and a glass of wine, two of my favorite things!

I can’t wait for Friday.  While not quite as exciting as Christmas, three of my favorite people will be on a call discussing my favorite subject – MARKETING!  More specifically, they will be discussing the marketing influence of tribes. 

Mark your calendar right this second – Friday, October 24th, at 10 a.m. Pacific Time – and Reserve Your Seat.

I’ll be shocked if phone lines aren’t jammed.  I consider all three of these men to be my marketing mentors, even if I really only know Seth Godin and Dave Lakhani through their books and speaking gigs.  I guess I must be part of their tribe. 

Seth Godin just released a book called Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, and Dave Lakhani, who was raised in a cult, has written several books on persuasion, including Subliminal Persuasion: Influence & Marketing Secrets They Don’t Want You To Know, and of course if you read my blog, you must know John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing. 

We have always had tribes – churches, schools, community groups, but they’ve been organized around place. Today we have tribes organized around ideas and the technology to tie those ideas together like never before – but who leads a community like that? How do you lead a community like that?

Join John Jantsch live this Friday, Oct 24 at 10 a.m. Pacific Time as his discusses this very relevant topic with Seth Godin and Dave Lakhani.  Best of all, the call is FREE! How can you pass up hearing from this trio of marketing superstars, when all it costs is an hour of your time?!

Can’t make the live call? Not to worry. Go ahead and register and you’ll receive a recording link when the call is over.  Spread the word!

In my Duct Tape Marketing workshops and coaching sessions, we talk about the sales hour-glass, the marketing system that turns the prospects into tryers, buyers, repeat buyers, and raving fans. Well, this week John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing showed us exactly how that’s done!

Adrianne Machina, Duct Tape Marketing Coach

About 25 of of the Duct Tape Marketing Coaches descended on Kansas City, Missouri for a 3-day intensive conference.  Every one of us Duct Tape Marketing Coaches has at least 10 years of marketing experience, and yet every one of us was overwhelmed my the quality and quantity of fresh, compelling content.  We were all “drinking from the firehose”, trying to soak up as much of the new information as we could.   How refreshing!  All of us have already bought into Duct Tape Marketing – but John inspired each of to reach for a new level of success with our businesses. 

The message here is that even if you have customers who have bought your products and services in the past, doesn’t mean that you can’t host sessions that will make them even happier and you even more profitable!  Sage and Microsoft Dynamics both put great importance on partner and customer conference because they know that bringing people together around a singular goal creates enthusiasm and energy.  Sure, you could learn the information over a web-conference, but it’s not at all the same.  Even small businesses can create excitement with lunch-and-learns, preferred-customer days, and similar in-person events. 

Of my many to-do’s for the meeting, is:

1.  Read Seth Godin’s new book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

2.  Tell all my friends to go vote for Canadian Duct Tape Marketing Coach Cidnee Stephen, so she and Sales Coach Kim Duke get picked up for a national TV show   http://tinyurl.com/446est  (And yes, Cidnee is that funny in person too!  Handcuffs …really? You decide, but I’m just saying that I gave them 5 stars.  Their show won’t be boring. That’s for sure!)

3.  Tell more people that if they don’t have enough, high-caliber clients today, then they absolutely must get started on the Duct Tape Marketing Guided Marketing Plan.  I haven’t pushed this program enough, but I will because THE RESULTS speak for themselves.  Not just my clients, but across the country, real struggling businesses are seeing real results by applying a system to calm their marketing madness. 

If you don’t want a California marketing coach, you can go out to the Find a Duct Tape Marketing Coach site and search for someone closer to you. 

I have tons of new information to share with you soon about the new offerings that are coming out from the Duct Tape Coaches network – but you’ll just have to wait – with eager anticipation, I hope! 

I know that many of you are new to business blogging.  So – for all you “newbie” business bloggers, I want give you some advice on creating compelling business blog content. 

When I tell my Tornado Marketing clients they can’t just pitch product and services, they’re often stumped. “Then what will we talk about?”  Chris Brogan wrote a great post “Blog Topics for Business to Business” about topics that are appealing – and yet not overboard on sales hype. Bookmark his site for easy reference.  And while you’re at it, head over to Copyblogger, which is filled to the brim with tips for better business blogging.

When you are blogging for business, you are blogging to promote your business, but your blog will go NOWHERE if you are just pitching product. If you don’t believe me, believe David Meerman Scott, who talks about this mistake in his post “The Top 5 Corporate Blogging Mistakes”.  Item #2 is:

Write excessively about their company’s products and services

Many marketers steeped in the tradition of product advertising naturally feel drawn to start a blog to prattle on and on about their damn products and services. But I have news for you. Nobody cares about your products and services (except you). When I visit a product-oriented blog, I immediately leave. And judging from the lack of comments on these blogs, most everyone else leaves too.

You must resist the urge to blog about what your company offers. Instead blog about a subject of interest to the people you are trying to reach. What problems do your buyer have that you can write about? How can you create content that informs and educates and entertains?

Read the rest of David Meerman’s post here: Top 5 Corporate Blogging Mistakes.

The point of business blogging is to STOP the “sell, sell, sell” push marketing mentality, and instead naturally attract people to your business by educating and informing them.   

And while I want you to understand that your content must be compelling and non-pitchy, I also want you to see that I didn’t have to come up with all the content for this blog post on my own.  I’ve surrounded myself with smart people who’ve already written the content I want to share with my blog readers.  So instead of trying to improve on the wisdom of social media superstars like David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan and Brian Clark (a.k.a. Copyblogger), I can send you to their blogs – or with proper attribution and a link back to their site, I can re-publish a snippet of their content on my business blog. 

You can use this technique too.  The key is to find experts or business leaders who you admire.  Share their knowledge.  You’re creating a win-win-win scenario. 

Your business blog will be filled with compelling content.
Your readers will be happy because they’re getting value.Â
Your expert sources will get new readers. 

It’s a beautiful new media world.  Group hug?

With the economy and the election all that people seem to be able to talk about, I thought I’d provide a moment of light-hearted levity.   Can you believe these ads?  I think in some cases here there’s a little TOO MUCH truth in advertising – and in other ads, no truth at all.  

That beauty micrometer looks painful.   And who knew Lysol could create such a happy marriage?  Now where does that Lysol go?  WHAT?  Not on the floors or appliances?  Oh my….

http://www.weirdomatic.com/creepy-ads.html 

Enjoy.  Focus on the positive.  Control what you can control.  And stay tuned. Subscribe to my workshops newsletter if you haven’t already.  I’m putting together a session, “The 7 Secrets to Small Business Advertising.”  And though I admit my session won’t be nearly as funny as these ads are, you will see big mistakes current day small businesses make all the time. 

It’s been an exhausting, exciting, seemingly endless week, and I admit I have fallen behind.  Please forgive me, my dear clients and precious prospects, I promise I will make it up to you.  I’m not sure that you even noticed, but I did. 

I could tell you all the “hiccups” that happened coming back after my week out of the office, how late I worked or how hard I tried, but the details aren’t that interesting.  In the end I just couldn’t get everything accomplished that I felt needed to be done.

I share my story with you because I’m sure there are times when you had to play catch-up from a trip, missed deadlines, made a mistake, or had to deal with unforeseen problems that set you back.  My “Inner Adrianne” is very harsh – she wants me to be perfect 100% of the time.  But apparently that’s not realistic.  So how did I handle it this week?  Were there things I could have done better?  You decide. This is what I did (to the best of my ability).

1. Prioritize. Marketing is not brain surgery, but there are times when missing a deadline can have a big negative impact. When everything seems both urgent and important, get it all out on paper. A master schedule helps you filter your must-do-right-away (pay bills) from your must-do-but-next-week-will-have-to-do (finish case study) to nice-to-do (write blog post).

2. Let a few things slide. My desk looks like a tornado hit it, my email has been pecked through to pick out the important messages only, and I’ve run my kids through Subway three times this week. But everyone has been fed, the bills are paid, and the rest can be cleaned up this weekend. Right?

3. Put clients first. My email newsletter system decided it didn’t want to play with Skype, so it retaliated by sending out emails with gobblety-gook code. (Thank you Carol Stewart for alerting me to the problem!) Instead of doing follow up with all the people I met at recent speaking engagements, I’ve been spending my time fixing the newsletters. I remind myself that I will have ample time to work with new clients, as soon as I catch up from being out of the office and dealing with these administrative hassles, but I owe my first allegiance to my customers.

4. Be Honest. By 4:00 on Thursday I was exhausted and I still had a long night ahead of me. (I was scheduled to speak at the Orange County Entrepreneurs Center meeting at 7:00 p.m.) Rather than pushing forward to teach a client social media marketing strategy, I just told him straight out that I was not on my A-game, and suggested we reschedule for Monday. It turned out the reschedule was better for him, and he appreciated that my intention was to give him his money’s worth of great advice.

5. Communicate. Before missing a deadline or a meeting, let people know you need a time extension. Sometimes you’re working with an artificial deadline anyway – and will get yourself all tied up in knots about something that’s unimportant to the client. (Thanks Diane Gasal for reminding me of that!) Sometimes the deadline is important, and you can work with the client to find another way to accomplish the objective. Just don’t let yourself think you can “squeeze it in” – that’s foolishness. (And believe me, I’ve been a fool at times.)

6. Seize the Moment. Some opportunities only knock once. This week I was interviewed by Referral Key for their radio show. http://www.referralkey.com/business-networking/blog/ and I was honored to be the guest speaker for the Orange County Entrepreneur’s Center. Some moments just can’t be Tivo’ed.

7. Apologize. I was late to two client meetings this week. I wanted to unwind the clock so badly, but all I could do was sincerely apologize. Sorry guys! Thanks for being so nice about it!! 

8. Breathe. It’s true that “the hurriedier I go, the behinder I get.” Sometimes just 10 deep breaths or time to walk the dog is all I need to replenish my spirit, and re-boot my brain.

9. Give 100%, then give yourself a break. I always give my best, but sometimes my best at that moment is not “my best.” Even Babe Ruth couldn’t hit it out of the ballpark every day.

Professional services are never “perfect” – they’re relationships that need to balanced and nurtured – like all relationships.  Most of us are 100 times harder on ourselves than we are on others.  I know I had moments of greatness this week, and moments of great stress.  I’m lucky to work with such good clients.  Thank you for letting me be human.  I’ll gladly return the favor – anytime.