Small Business Marketing & Business Acceleration | FrontlineMarketingSystems.com

How to get FREE: Two Brain Audit Audio Files

Posted on 18. May, 2012 by Sean D'Souza in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Last week you got a chunky 30-page excerpt of The Brain Audit. This week you can get two short five-minute audio files. These short audios will teach you two very important lessons which you can implement straight away.

What you will learn:
1) What is the difference between ‘The Solution’ and ‘Your Solution’ ?

2)  How to write a tag-line.

Deadline?
There is a deadline though. You have to get it before May 26th, 2012. Then it’s gone. So get it right away.

Either download it, or listen online.

Here are the links: (It may take a few minutes to play)
Solution Vs Your Solution

How to Create A Tagline

So what’s the reason behind this generosity?
Well I sure want you to see how The Brain Audit can help you in your business. That’s the one good reason

Sean
P.S. Don’t forget to download the audio before May 26th, 2012.

What If Your Customers Could Talk to Your CRM

Posted on 18. May, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, CRM, Duct Tape Marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

I spend a lot of time talking to and about the stuff that we do to make it work now. So sometimes it’s a real treat to get to talk to someone that’s so far out ahead of most of us in their thinking that you pretty much just listen with your mouth open when they talk. (I would put my conversation with Kevin Kelly in this class)

Recently I had a chance to visit for a bit with one of those folks – Doc Searls. Doc is senior editor for Linux Journal, alumnus fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and co-author of the seminal work – The Cluetrain Manifesto with Rick Levine, Christopher Locke and David Weinberger. (Look for our conversation in a coming episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.)

In 2000, Searls and company painted the road map for what was coming only to have it high jacked to some degree by marketers that misinterpreted the manifesto as a foreshadowing of social media. When Cluetrain told the world that markets are conversations, they meant, I fear, that we as marketers should have an actual conversation and not simply listen and react in ways that tailored our marketing conversations to the research we are now able to obtain via social sharing. (Click on this search for “markets are conversations” and you’ll get an even grimmer sense of this.)

In Searls’ latest work, The Intention Economy, he returns to the notion of conversations but puts the onus and control firmly in the hands of the consumer and not the organization. A great deal of the work that Searls was engaged in at Berkman surrounding the notion of something that’s become known as Vendor Relationship Management or VRM.

The idea of VRM is drawn from the traditional customer relationship language, but shifts the management aspect to the customer instead of the organization. In a VRM environment, the customer controls a great deal of the data and experience and is the determining party in how much or how little is tailored to their wants.

One doesn’t have too look to far out into future space to imagine a technology that enables customer to interact with CRM platforms in a way that allows them to decide what to share, what to update and what to request.

Can you imagine how powerful this type of true conversation could be?

The real hurdle is data trust, or lack of, but I believe we are sitting on a privacy bubble.

So, at what point do we rebel against being used as part of Facebook’s product? At what point do we start to demand the ability to control our own health records? At what point do we tell CVS to shove the little stupid rewards card and start to spend only with those that accept markets are conversations and that relationships are not data.

Enable true intentions in your customer relationships and open your organization to a world of commerce that does not currently exist.

What If Your Customers Could Talk to Your CRM is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

What If Your Customers Could Talk to Your CRM

Posted on 18. May, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, CRM, Duct Tape Marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

I spend a lot of time talking to and about the stuff that we do to make it work now. So sometimes it’s a real treat to get to talk to someone that’s so far out ahead of most of us in their thinking that you pretty much just listen with your mouth open when they talk. (I would put my conversation with Kevin Kelly in this class)

Recently I had a chance to visit for a bit with one of those folks – Doc Searls. Doc is senior editor for Linux Journal, alumnus fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and co-author of the seminal work – The Cluetrain Manifesto with Rick Levine, Christopher Locke and David Weinberger. (Look for our conversation in a coming episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.)

In 2000, Searls and company painted the road map for what was coming only to have it high jacked to some degree by marketers that misinterpreted the manifesto as a foreshadowing of social media. When Cluetrain told the world that markets are conversations, they meant, I fear, that we as marketers should have an actual conversation and not simply listen and react in ways that tailored our marketing conversations to the research we are now able to obtain via social sharing. (Click on this search for “markets are conversations” and you’ll get an even grimmer sense of this.)

In Searls’ latest work, The Intention Economy, he returns to the notion of conversations but puts the onus and control firmly in the hands of the consumer and not the organization. A great deal of the work that Searls was engaged in at Berkman surrounding the notion of something that’s become known as Vendor Relationship Management or VRM.

The idea of VRM is drawn from the traditional customer relationship language, but shifts the management aspect to the customer instead of the organization. In a VRM environment, the customer controls a great deal of the data and experience and is the determining party in how much or how little is tailored to their wants.

One doesn’t have too look to far out into future space to imagine a technology that enables customer to interact with CRM platforms in a way that allows them to decide what to share, what to update and what to request.

Can you imagine how powerful this type of true conversation could be?

The real hurdle is data trust, or lack of, but I believe we are sitting on a privacy bubble.

So, at what point do we rebel against being used as part of Facebook’s product? At what point do we start to demand the ability to control our own health records? At what point do we tell CVS to shove the little stupid rewards card and start to spend only with those that accept markets are conversations and that relationships are not data.

Enable true intentions in your customer relationships and open your organization to a world of commerce that does not currently exist.

What If Your Customers Could Talk to Your CRM is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Who Doesn’t Need Great Free Stuff?

Posted on 17. May, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, Duct Tape Marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Next week is National Small Business Week in the United States and to help celebrate all things small business I’m holding a live webcast where, among other things, I’m going to give a number of lucky participants some awesome business tools like:

• A copy of Premise Landing Page Software from Copyblogger
• A copy of the Ultimate Marketing System from Duct Tape Marketing
• A year access to Live Plan from Palo Alto Software
• A year of Spring Metrics Analytics
• A year of Nimble CRM
• A Pro Membership to Marketing Profs
• Tickets to Social Media Explore Events
• A bundle of books, iStockphoto credits and more

But, in order to have a chance to win one of these great prizes, you have to attend our small business educational webcast event being held Wednesday, May 23rd at 11am CT (http://worldtimebuddy.com to check time zones)

I’m going into a television studio and broadcasting a live streaming video presentation on the very important topic – 5 Ways to Use Online Tools to Drive Offline Sales.

We all know that prospects today do their research online, even if they fully intend to buy a product or service offline. In this session I’ll share some great ways to use the new breed of online tools to drive your prospects into your offline stores, meetings and presentations including:

• Online calls to action
• O2O Advertising
• Networked networking
• Local social groups
• Online and on the go

Join me for what will prove to be a fun and informative celebration of small business – heck, I might even get my guitar out and sing a bit. (No promises on that one.)

To sign up and reserve your seat for the show – Register Here (While you can’t win any of the prizes unless you attend, we will record the event and provide an archive for all that register.)

I addition, some of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultants are holding local networking and watch events and providing additional education – find a local event near you.

Do you know other small business owners that might need this important information? Why not share this post with all your small business friends?

And a special thanks to our sponsors for support of this event!

Who Doesn’t Need Great Free Stuff? is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

13 Questions That Will Lead You To Your Perfect Marketing Strategy

Posted on 15. May, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, Duct Tape Marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, The Marketing Hourglass, Vision

Plenty of startups try to determine the perfect business model to take to market only to find that the market doesn’t need, want or understand what they are presenting.

The fact is most books or courses on business models take this into consideration by suggesting trial and error scenarios and market hypothesizes prior to launch.

Any business model, or plan for that matter, is little more than a guess and I believe that your best chance for getting that guess right is to build your business model based on a marketing strategy.

This assumes the role a fully developed marketing strategy actually should play in determining the direction of an organization. The fact is most people, if they consider marketing strategy at all, stop at a core message, identity elements and perhaps a sales proposition and call it a strategy.

A marketing strategy is how you plan to use the resources available to you to build an ongoing case that your business, products and services are the obvious choice for a narrowly defined ideal customer.

If you accept this expanded view of marketing strategy then I would suggest you answer the following questions in an attempt to measure where your strategy stands today and where it could go if your understood and integrated it fully as your business model

1. What about this job, work, or organization are you passionate about?
2. How does this business serve a higher purpose for you and your customers?
3. What value do you really bring that benefits your market in ways that your competitors wouldn’t dream of proposing
4. What’s the dominant personality trait that you need your customers to associate with your business?
5. What does an ideal client look like?
6. What is the simple 10-word core message that explains and excites?
7. How will your market become aware of your business?
8. How will your market come to trust that you have the answers?
9. What are the revenue sources that you can tap to grow this business?
10. Can you describe the perfect customer experience throughout your organization?
11. What resource gaps and constraints do you need to overcome to achieve your strategy?
12. What partnerships do you need to create in order to achieve your strategy?
13. What would the result of using this strategy model to run your business look like?

13 Questions That Will Lead You To Your Perfect Marketing Strategy is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

How to get a FREE 30-Page Excerpt of The Brain Audit (Without Even Needing To Fill A Form)

Posted on 11. May, 2012 by Sean D'Souza in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Engaging Your Macro Metric As a True Measure of Success

Posted on 11. May, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, Duct Tape Marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Business owners and marketers are told to measure and quantify everything. The problem is this practice alone can lead to false assumptions and a fixation on things that simply don’t matter that much.

lollipolluza via Flickr

Are website visits, Facebook Likes, newsletter signups or even revenue the true measure of success for your business? Perhaps, but how so? When we simply create a list of what we might call key performance indicators without the proper focus with which to weight them, it all simply becomes an exercise in collecting.

It’s a lot like having a bunch of puzzle pieces without the box top picture that gives the pieces context.

The trick is to set all the measurement and analysis aside for a bit and determine your own unique and overriding “macro metric” of success. This is the one thing that you measure above all as a signal of the health of the business. This is the measure of the success of your overriding marketing strategy.

Once you do that you then you can use other data that measures things like awareness, engagement, sharing, loyalty, relationships, referrals and revenue as way to refine your focus on what matters most.

The macro metric is the core measure of “who you are” or “how you want” the brand to be perceived. It’s the one tangible or intangible signal that you’re being true to why you do what you do.

I’ll warn you, finding this one true measure isn’t always the easiest task and there’s no marketing analytics book that can shortcut this idea for you. You discover it when you decide the higher purpose your business serves and when you then listen to how your community describes that higher purpose.

I determined my macro metric years ago and I’ve used it as a guide for a great deal of what we do. For Duct Tape Marketing the metric is usefulness.

We go to great lengths to determine if what we’re doing is useful to our community and to the market as a whole. This thinking influences our content creation, our education, our products, our follow-up, our strategic partnerships, our analysis of revenue per customer, our traffic building, our lead generation, our lead conversion and even our internal processes to a large degree.

We ask our customers to share what they find useful. We track the number of times that people volunteer that something we’ve done is practical and useful. We get nervous when we don’t hear that word from our community during the course of any given day.

Find your macro metric and tie every other key performance indicator you can track and perhaps a few that you can simply feel to this metric and your brand will flourish.

Oh, and I sincerely hope you found this post useful.

Engaging Your Macro Metric As a True Measure of Success is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

5 Meaningful Shifts Shaping Marketing Right Now

Posted on 10. May, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, Duct Tape Marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social crm, Social Media

Trends are funny. In some cases they jump up out of nowhere and demand to be noticed. In other cases, in fact in most cases, they bubble up over a long period, kick around in other industries and finally get realized by a larger group as relevant to their current way of life.

Orbiter7 via Flickr

But trends are also terribly misleading because they are often overstated and simplified and tend to focus on a tool rather than the underlying behavior. Think about when Twitter got hot. Everyone talked about the tool, but few realized that it was simply the embodiment of a way to communicate that people were looking for. Understanding that shift allowed some to take advantage of the behavior rather than the tool and this put them miles ahead of the trend.

Today I want to talk about five shifts that I see making an impact right now on both the way we go to market and the way the market comes to us.

1) Little Commitments

Generic information overload is causing a real bottleneck for marketers. We’ve been told over and over again to produce content, but now the competition for content is choking, rather than informing, our prospects.

Our prospects don’t have or won’t take the time to learn all about our great solutions even if it’s in their best interest to do so. Our job now is to offer them little pieces of information that move them ever so slightly in the direction of personalizing their experience with us.

Tools like the pop up survey from Kiss Insights, a guided content path created by using WordPress plugin Survey Funnel, a guided tour using a tool like WalkMe or the ability to present dynamically relevant content through a tool like GetSmartContent will become increasingly important as ways to filter our own content and create more personalized trust building experiences.

2) Video SEO

One of the most dramatic changes in Google’s indexing of local business pertains to video. Right now a local business has a better chance of ranking for highly relevant search terms using YouTube hosted, highly optimized videos than any other approach.

Smart marketers are serializing their most important keyword phrases and frequently asked questions using video and optimizing these videos through specific file names, descriptions, keywords and transcripts.

Using a tool like Traffic Geyser also makes it easier to spread these videos to other video sharing sites in order to garner further traffic and links.

3) Visual Scanning

One needs looks no further than the current hype of Pinterest or the $1Billion dollar sale of photo sharing site Instagram to witness the visual scanning behavior impact. These sites soared in popularity in large part due to information overload and the stimulation caused by visual interest.

It is far easier to look at a thousand pictures than to consume a thousand words.

To me this doesn’t simply mean jump on the Pinterest bandwagon. It signals a behavior that must be adopted rather than a tool. We must start offering visual scanning of our brands by using images in all that we do.

Get in the habit of taking photos of your world and your customer’s world each and every day.

When we post a status update or amplify a recent blog post on Facebook upload an image and describe the image rather than simply using the blog post thumbnail. In addition to added visual impact, Facebook favors images over most other content and will show your post to more followers.

Use a tool like Postagram that allows you to turn Instragram photos into higher quality photo postcards. Imagine the impact of meeting with a client, snapping a photo and sending them a personalized photo thank you card. Or what about sending your client a postcard of the product you’re building just for them?

4) The Digital Persona

Market research folks have long talked about uncovering the rare combination of factors that lead to fully understanding what a market needs, wants, and believes. Much of this information can be gleaned from demographic and psychographic research, but few things have produced more relevant research into the actual demonstrated behavior of a market than the trail of clues our prospects leave every day online.

In many cases researches now have verified proof that what markets say and what they do online are not always the same thing and this important digital aspect must be one that is considered in the make up of our ideal customer profile.

At the very least we must add browser plugins like Rapportive that give us social media data on the people we interact with to our communication toolset.

We must make our CRM systems understand social behavior and score, nurture and move our leads forward using this data.

We must start to create prospect and client personas that include digital behavior clues.

5) ROBO

Few things have had a more dramatic impact on local business than the behavior to research online to buy offline (ROBO) that is practiced by an approaching 90% of all adults as a way to find local products and services.

What this means is that we must expand the way we think about our website far beyond the means to provide information. Our website must become a tool to drive online searchers and visitors offline into our stores, into our presentation and into our Meetups.

Our websites must feature local call to action tools such as downloadable coupons, samples and trials. We must add and use click to call, schedule or chat functionality that allows for instant engagement.

We must think of ways to create our own offline communities and build these communities with online tools such as LinkedIn Groups, MeetUps or even creating our own leads and referral groups using a tool like LocalBase.

Each new and accepted tactic brings with it corresponding changes in behavior and impact that can only be seen by paying close attention to the underlying shifts rather than focusing on the latest hype.

5 Meaningful Shifts Shaping Marketing Right Now is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

You Hired Your First Marketing Person, Now What

Posted on 08. May, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, Duct Tape Marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, strategy

You’ve done it, you’ve worked and pushed and sold your way into the realization that you need help. And thankfully, help means – help marketing the business.

So, you put out some feelers and landed an eager marketing assistant to, you know, “do marketing.” And that’s where the trouble began.

You see, do marketing is kind of fuzzy, but it’s all you’ve got, so you’re hoping your new marketing assistant can take your marketing success to date and run with it, but the reality is marketing is a system and your lack of one is never more evident until such time as you try to do it with the help of others.

The key to getting any business on track is two fold. First you must develop the marketing strategy that is perfect for your business and then you must install and operate a marketing system that takes advantage of that unique strategy

The first thing you must come to understand is that strategy and tactics are two very distinct functions and while, in some cases, the same person may perform them, they require a much different mindset and approach to develop.

Strategy vs. tactics

The first mindset is something I call the “owner’s mindset.” The entire focus of this mindset it to create and hold a marketing strategy and vision for the business based on a narrowly defined ideal client and core value proposition.

The second mindset is the “systems mindset.” In this frame of mind you move to building a marketing system designed to support your unique strategy and leverage and amplify the unique strengths and opportunities that exist in your market.

If you’re ever to create marketing momentum in your business you must embrace a marketing strategy as your core reason for being and you must be able to bring others into your organization and teach them how to operate your marketing system.

You simply can not have one without the other.

Sounds simple right?

If any of this sounds right to you, then I’ll leave you today with a bit of a commercial.

I’ve created a unique, two-session live and in-person workshop that’s aimed fully at this strategy and tactics approach.

Introducing . . .
The Ultimate Marketing Strategy Workshop and System Training

In this unique, live and in-person two session workshop, participants will learn how to create both strategy and tactics, ideas and execution, and get the entire marketing team on the same page – even it that team is just you.

This two-session event is designed to help business owners build a marketing action plan from the two core points of view – Strategy and Tactics.

The first session is set up for the business owner’s mindset so they can discover and refine a marketing strategy for their entire business. The second session is designed for more tactical business owners or key marketing staff members who are charged with building and operating the tactical system. The combination of strategy and tactics positioned in this way makes it the perfect balance of training for the entire organization.

I am offering the first occasion of this training in Kansas City in June to a very small group so that everyone involved can experience a true hands on, intimate working session. If you’re interested in finding out more, visit our workshop description page.

You Hired Your First Marketing Person, Now What is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

How To Know If You Have A Viable Niche

Posted on 07. May, 2012 by beren in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

When companies from the West first visited a de-regulated India, they were licking their fingers in anticipation. For India was a country of almost one billion people (well, it is over one billion now) and these companies could just see dollar signs no matter where they went. But sheer numbers doesn’t make for sales.

And many companies burned themselves trying to get off the ground, because the vast majority of people simply couldn’t or wouldn’t buy their products. They learned, after a lot of trial and error that sheer numbers don’t mean a thing.

The same applies to determining if you have a viable niche

It’s impossible to know at first if what you’re doing is going to be successful. So you look for one big factor: competition.

Huh? Competition?

Yes, competition. If you can find a ton of competition, then you know it’s extremely viable. Why? Because a whole truckload of people have been there before you and have found it viable to keep running their businesses. But just having that truckload still isn’t the best denominator, so you go even further.

You subscribe to their list. You see what they’re doing. Are they selling higher priced product and services? Or is it all discount priced? If you sniff some higher prices, then you know for sure that there is a market, and a high price market too. If that high price continues over the years, then you know for sure that it’s sustainable.

This isn’t a foolproof method

You’re looking in from the outside, so it’s hard to know for sure what profits etc, exist in the business. But at least you know it’s viable.

This is how I got into marketing

You see I was indeed fascinated with marketing, but fascination isn’t enough. The book that nudged my life in a different direction was ‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins. And in this book, there was a concept called ‘The Hedgehog Principle’. And the principle consisted of three questions.

1) What can you be the best in the world at?

2) What drives your economic engine?

3) What are you deeply passionate about?

So I was passionate about marketing, and could easily be the best in the world at it (if I started, which I did). But the third question is the one that the companies that came to India never answered. And that is: What drives your engine? How viable is this niche?

And the answer must come from the market

The more competition that exists, the more viable the product or service. Which means that if the market is saturated with fad diets, you have more of a chance of writing a bestseller with a fad diet, than with a rigourous lifelong diet. If TV is swamped with reality shows, then you’re better off making yet another—yes, another—reality show.

And back to my story: At the time, people like Jay Abraham were selling single seats at workshops for $5000. I went to workshops that were priced at $10,000. All around me I could see clearly that people were selling product both offline, and shortly after, online too. And for pricey sums too.

And price is a good benchmark

That high price factor shows that not only does the market exist, but it’s a mature market allowing for pricier amounts as well. And there’s another thing about the high prices. It allows smaller players to co-exist.

If everyone is discounting each other in a tiny market, then you struggle to get off the ground. But if there are several layers of pricing, it’s a lot easier for you to not just get into the niche, but slowly power your way up as well, if you wish.

But what if you don’t want to follow the crowd?

Well, that’s noble, but the pioneers always get the arrows. This means you have to educate the market and that takes a lot of time and effort. And of course, money. It’s a lot better to follow the crowd (read: competition) and start off there, and then later, once you’ve got enough of a following, branch off where you will.

Big companies can burn through tens of millions of dollars, and not feel so much as a twinge.

You can lose a lot less and run into serious trouble. It’s better to start with the competition.

It sure saves having to stock up on all the anti-burn lotion.

P.S. Do you have a question or comment? Write it here and I will respond.

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