by Scott on March 09, 2007
Whether it’s marketing departments at Fortune 500 companies or a small business marketing team, I’ve observed the split between those that produce the product and those that try to attract customers to it. In these companies its not the job of the producer of the product to market it. As a small business owner, you do not have that split though.
So, here are a few thoughts on why small business marketing is important and why small business owners may not think of themselves as the marketing department. In my next articles I’ll share seven tips on how to practice small business marketing without becoming a salesperson.
3 Reasons New Business Owners Don’t Put Too Much Planning into Marketing
Bob Walsh reminded his readers of an excellent, relevant video of a Seth Goodin presentation to Google called All Marketers are Liars. Godin’s right – marketers are liars (it’s called puffery). And who wants to be a “liar”? Not me. Not you.
Yet the truth is that competency at a task does not correlate to how well the resulting products are received or celebrated. This is a hard thing for microISVs and most small businesses owners to hear. Here are three reasons why people put too little thought into their small business marketing plans.
- They’ve been told they’re the best programmer (or lawn care guy, accountant, painter, etc) that people have ever worked with. What more could people want?
Yet company owners are only paid if they get “hired”. Being great at building the product or service the company offers does not make one great at getting “hired” in the first place.
- They Have Such Personal Excitement About Their Product That They Don’t See How Anyone Could Not Immediately Just Want It?
Again, people could only want it if they hear about it. The marketing efforts we will talk about in the next article are all about helping people hear about a product, try products, and talk with others about their experiences.
- They Don’t Want To Be One of Those Slimy Greedy Salespeople.
They’re not alone in this aversion to sales. Katherine B. Hartman, a marketing professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington says that in an analysis of movies and TV shows from 1903 to 2005 “the salesperson character personifies some of society’s most despised characteristics-greed, deception, distrust, and selfishness.”
So I’m not proposing all small business owners become salespeople. I’m recommending that new companies should plan from the beginning for the marketability of their products, services, and business and have a small business marketing plan. In fact, make it part of deciding what product or services to offer.
Part two of this series is here.
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by Scott on March 09, 2007
LeadsOnRails.com now has a reports to help users measure marketing results. Details here. Next up: we are tying these effectiveness reports directly to lead capture web forms to help users develop effective web campaigns.
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by Scott on March 09, 2007
Authoring white-papers, newsletters, and blog entries can certainly be effective marketing tools. To know just how effective you need to measure costs and resulting leads. But too often business owners forget to account for their own time.
White Papers, E-Mail, and Webinars
This month’s (March 2007) issue of Inc. magazine has an article called “Wooing Customers One White Paper at a Time” (the subject of the article has invested over $2 million in white papers over the years). Dan Dershem of LeanLogistics is featured and shares his marketing budget. Here are some key points:
Marketing budget as percent of revenue:
2006: 7%
2007: 4.6%
Lead Acquisition:
e-newsletter budget up by 130%.
webinar budget down by 55%.
This is one company focussing on e-newsletters because they’ve found them inexpensive and effective. Dersham reports that e-mail campaigns resulted in double the number of leads at one-sixth the cost of producing a Webinar.
Many small business owners write their own e-mail campaigns which keeps cost down. Yet, if you author your own company’s emails, whitepapers, and blog entries, then you might be underestimating the cost of those marketing efforts.
If you run a report like this (ignore the numbers, they are fake and not the point of this article):
make sure that you are including your time in the estimate of lead acquisition and marketing cost. (Click here
to see the system that created this report).
Whether it be maintaining a blog or writing emails, you need to assign yourself an effective hourly rate and estimate much time you spend on those activities. Armed with this info you can then get a true picture of the marketing effectiveness of those activities.
Alternative Authors?
Why is this important? Why measure something if you are not going to change it? That’s a good question. So the second part of this article is a call to business owners to measure alternatives as well. What if you had others in the company or professional copy writers author your emails? What if you bought industry newsletters? What if you paid a blogger?
It might be worthwhile to try a professionally written campaign and then measure results. Just be sure to include the cost of your time in the self-authored campaigns.
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by Scott on March 08, 2007
For you tech types – here’s a couple examples of technical interaction in place of integration. A user wanted to pull files from Basecamp, the 37Signals application, into their LeadsOnRails application as read-only background information for a salesperson talking with a client.
37Signals provides an Application Programming Interface (API) for just such interfaces. Yet retrieval of files are not supported by the API. All is not lost though because we simply put a link into their LeadsOnRails screen which, when clicked, searches for and displays the user’s files using good old http urls – the same urls that the Basecamp search button creates. (The user needs to manually log into Basecamp once).
This is a very simple example yet one can easily imagine more complex technical examples such as gMail interactions where the url is not readily apparent and one page can often have dozens of requests. Google supports some integration efforts with APIs. But just because there is not an API does not mean you cannot interact with it, especially when talking web applications.
Side note: We see these type of interactions between people all of the time. Especially in the corporate world of org. charts and hierarchys. There is a formal way and “other” ways to accomplish goals, share information, and make decisions. And with people, it is often the informal way that gets results.
Don’t let the lack of a formal system, agrement or contract keep you from making improvements (both technical and personal) to your interactions and relationships.
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by Scott on March 08, 2007
Here is how I added Digg voting buttons to a Rails powered Typo blog. Digg buttons come in several types. You can build out a full-size Digg button, a compact sized one, or use your own image. I’m adding compact buttons.
See here for details on Digg button html code and all the different options. When you have chosen what options you want to use, here’s the code that worked for me.
app/views/articles/read.rhtml
This is the view in Typo rendered when a single article is shown. Because this view is the view to the article, you do not need to tell Digg the URL. (Digg assumes the current URL when the diggthis script is called).
Here’s code that worked for me. Again, review the details on the Digg site for other options. The key for Typo users is that the digg_title can be set to the name of the article. I inserted this code right after the line with author_link(@article).
<script type="text/javascript">
digg_skin = 'compact';
digg_title = <%= "'" + h(@article.title) + "'" %>;
</script>
<script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
app/views/articles/_article.rhtml
_article.rhtml is a partial used in typo to show an article in the blog’s list of articles. Because each article in the list will have a different URL to send to Digg, you will want to set the digg_url parameter as in this example. In the call to article_url, the false parameter makes sure that the entire path is set in the url. I added this code right before the <%= article.body_html %> line.
<p>
<script type="text/javascript">
digg_skin = 'compact';
digg_title = <%= "'" + h(article.title) + "'" %>;
digg_url = <%= "'" + article_url(article, false) + "'" %>;
</script>
<script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
</p>
Try it out
Now, next time you enter a new article, you’ll have Digg buttons where readers can Digg your writing. Try it out.
RailsWeek.com
Most of the time, my blog articles with actual code in them will be found over at my Rails blog – RailsWeek.com. Please subscribe to that one if you find Rails code tips and tricks interesting.
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