9 Themes for Small Business Marketing

Editor's Notes

1. We are in the age of collaboration. Book by Rachel Botsman published in 2010 called “What’s mine is yours” She talks about the currency of the new collaborative economy being trust . And the reputation that brings becoming increasingly important in underpinning business activity in the future. Look at Slideshare, 100,000 new members and 400,000 presentations uploaded November 2011 alone. 7.4 million presentations now on-line available for free. Couch surfing. For anyone not familiar with it, couch surfing is the idea of letting people you don’t know from places you’ve never heard of, sleep at your house in return for not much more than helping with the washing up and a reciprocal arrangement to stay with them. According to New Yorker magazine in April couchsurfing.org has nearly 4 million members (now the largest travel network in the world). WhipCar the UK’s biggest car pool. Lend you car to a complete stranger for a fee. Collaboration, sharing and altruism are becoming mainstream . http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0007395914/ref=dp_proddesc_1?ie=UTF8&n=266239 www.slideshare.net
2. More specifically the potential benefits of marketing collaboration : • The benefits of sharing knowledge, experience and best practice: the fact we are all here suggests some empathy with this. • The altruistic value of sharing is something we shouldn’t overlook. • Reducing design and print production costs: do 5 or 6 or 10 companies selling essentially the same services to a similar audience but in different locations all need to pay for design and copywriting and print. • Reducing web design and build costs: again do 5 or 6 companies need to employ 5 or 6 different web designers to design and build their websites. The two companies I work closest with are direct competitors - a graphic designer and a design and internet company - based within 5 miles of each other, competing for essentially the same type of business but all benefiting from working together. There may be potential problems and conflicts of interest but I think the problems are significantly outweighed by the benefits of collaboration.
3. You might think there is nothing new about the idea and you are right . What is new is: • first the importance we now need to attach to this area of marketing and • the coming together of the skills and technology surrounding creating content, web design and content management systems, traditional marketing, social media, sharing tools, bringing all these strands together under this new discipline or idea of Content Marketing.
4. Why Content Marketing is important: • Content engages customers, draws them in and keep them there. People talk about making websites ‘sticky’ which is about encouraging people to stay and come back again with interesting and relevant content. • Content marketing for search engines: search engines (as well as customers) feed off content. More later on this but Google’s Panda and Penguin updates are putting much more emphasis on content when ranking websites • Content curation: recent area quietly grown tremendously over last 12 months or so. There is a marketing benefit from organising, making available and - importantly - adding value to other people’s content. Adding value by making information more accessible, more easy to understand or more valuable by adding your own insight. Curation also takes the pressure off generating new content all the time. • Content marketing make or break! Not all good news. I find without exception the single biggest factor that causes on and off-line marketing campaigns to fail and stall is the inability of companies to generate content - another reason to consider a collaborative approach. http://www.crowdcontent.com
5. A few of the many content curation tools available, although curation must ‘add value’ to be an effective marketing tool.
6. paper.li Excellent curation tool in an ‘on-line newspaper’ format.
7. More events, webinars, white papers devoted to SEO than probably any other aspect of digital marketing. First of all I will try to summarise all of the webinars and podcasts and seminars into five words. I said it was going to be simplified - particularly when you consider that one of this words is Google. My starting point for all SEO is: GIVE GOOGLE WHAT THEY WANT! And what does Google want? Basically to deliver the best, most relevant, most up-to-date web sites for any given search to the top of the search results page. Google has evolved through various phases to achieve this, way back keywords in the meta tags were the thing. More recently in coming links but now (Panda and Penguin updates) it apprears good quality good quality relevant Content is becoming the real driving force behind site ranking. And will remain so. Not suggesting that every will writer can have the best and most relevant website. Suggesting keep this idea in mind when planning or managing and/or reviewing your website and on-line strategy.
8. Other issues: • Fresh content: brochure type web sites are no longer relevant • Keywords in the domain name and keywords in the page name seem to be important • Backlinks are still important - who links to you • Landing pages are important (Lakeland website - only 50% of traffic comes in via the home page) • Digital asset optimisation - including keywords in the names of images, videos, PDFs etc used on your website • Local search sign up to Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local Listings http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/10/the-static-website-is-dead-long-live-personalized-content
9. Any SEO specialist would rightfully tell you that there is much more to it than that. Plumb Nation have an SEO strategy involving around 65,000 keywords/phrases. If you are able to pay £300 - £400 per day for a SEO specialist to work on your website you will probably get better results than by just following the guidelines I have just given. But if you are not in a position to invest that sort of money in SEO then hopefully there is enough here to get you own SEO moving in the right direction. http://www.business2community.com/seo/local-seo-the-most-important-online-marketing-strategy-for-most-small-businesses-0290358
10. Search for Will writing Cambridge
11. Cambridge Wills came top. Important: Keywords in url, page name, heading and text.
12. Search for Inheritance Tax Planning Cambridge
13. Again, keywords in the page name, heading and text
14. Keywords in the page name, heading and text
15. Coming partly from a graphic design background I have spent most of my career being totally opposed to the buying in a cheap design template for anything, as an alternative to commissioning creative and original design. However I have bought and used several design templates for small budget projects. Because there are now so many excellent templates around.
16. To design, and construct a website of this complexity from scratch might cost around £2000. This Wordpress theme, from Theme Forest, approx 50 US dollars!
17. This Blog/News style (Wordpress theme), from Elegant themes, approx 40 US dollars.
18. A website we built as a charitable project for a community guiding group in Southern Tanzania. Bought-in theme, used social media to find people with relevant photos we could use (people who had visited the area). Total cost approx 50 US dollars. The returns - life-changing.
19. Template options: • html templates edited via Dreamweaver • Wordpress templates (or other CMS). Widely used and easy to use open source CMS. Half days formal training or a few days studying a few on-line tutorials and you’re off. • Set up is Straightforward rather than Simple to set up: buy theme, contact your webhost and buy/set up MySQL database, download and install Wordpress, upload the theme, start adding content. Or could get someone to do the installation for you to populate. Or you could buy the theme and get someone else to install it which is still much cheaper than a bespoke design • Third option if you can’t find a theme from the hundreds that are available or you have a particular corporate style you wanted to follow is get a Wordpress developer to build a theme for you based on a design you supply although this is getting into the more expensive realm of bespoke design. Useful web addresses: http://themeforest.net http://www.woothemes.c om (excellent themes and on-line tutorial videos) http://www.elegantthemes.com
20. Responsive web design Starting to take hold in last 12 months. The convergence of several technologies and soon set to become mainstream. With conventional web design in an ideal world you would design a website to display on a PC or a MAC, them perhaps a modified site to work on a tablet device and a substantially modified version to work on a smart phone. With responsive web design you build one website and you let the CSS (style sheets) determine what content is displayed on which devices.
21. Similar to Content Marketing in that Storytelling is not new (40,000 years old in fact). But now we have a convergence of ideas and technologies that have come together under this idea of storytelling as a marketing tool.
22. Storytelling in marketing is powerful because: • The biggest difference between you and your competitors is you, stories allow you to tell something about you. • Stories allow you to differentiate yourself from everyone else. Facts and figures are no necessarily that unique to you but stories are • Stories are just more interesting than facts about your business. You presentation will hopefully be more memorable • They allow people to know you better (for better or worse) • People aren’t moved by facts and figures - they are moved by emotion
23. Practical takeaways • Bring some emotion to your marketing • Tell authentic stories about real people and real situations • Stories help build your personal brand and build relationships Book worth reading “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human” looks at some of the science behind storytelling. Speakeasy: An organisation/networking group based in manchester which helps people harness the power of storytelling for their business: http://speakeasygroups.com Article on storytelling for business: http://www.freelance-marke ting.co/blog/?p=551
24. Won’t embarrass anyone by asking who has and who hasn’t got a written marketing plan. But will ask who didn’t have, at the end of last year, a written, relevant marketing plan designed to achieve clear marketing objectives for 2012?
25. I implore everyone to draft their marketing action plan within the next seven days (or review your current plan) . Not referring here to your detailed 20+ page Strategic Marketing Plan (which you should also write at some point). I am referring to a simple Action Plan or checklist summarising what you are trying to achieve, your key selling points (what makes you different of better than the competition), who and where your audience is, the marketing tools that are available and how exactly you are going to use these tools in order to convince the market that you are different or better than anyone else. The more concise you can make it the better. People probably dissuaded from doing this because they haven’t got time. Really doesn’t need that much time.
26. My written plan here... This is I would say 80% of my marketing plan, which took about 20 minutes to write. You can probably tell from the handwriting never intended for public consumption. But in the spirit of collaboration we covered earlier - here it is. I put this up here to get across the idea that writing your action plan is not such a daunting task. It doesn’t take long to put the outline together, then add some detail. Then print it out, keep it on your desk, in your briefcase on your iPad so you can keep working on it, reviewing it, evaluating and refining it. I am all in favour of the ‘two hour marketing plan’. http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/marketing/marketing-strategy/your-marketing-plan/how-to-prepare-a-marketing-plan http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/tools/marketing-plan-template http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/43026
27. 1. The marketing plan: nothing is fixed. Why evaluation is important. You can’t do everything.. You can’t do everything so don’t feel you should try to do everything. Don’t feel that you need to have a Blog and a Facebook page and an active Twitter account and be a serial networker and spend time on Linkedin. Do the things you are able to do. And if they don’t work change them. You are very unlikely to get everything right first time. I have a very active Linkedin account and a Blog but no business presence on Facebook. There just isn’t enough time. You need to choose what works for you (and this is where collaboration comes in to share content) but be prepared to change and consider new things.
28. 2. The business plan: multiple income streams, new model for business This idea of change and the willingness to change can have a deeper impact on the business itself. The familiar model of learning something, developing expertise in it and developing into a business that you carry on with until you retire just isn’t that reliable anymore. The idea that what was a viable business now struggles to provide a reasonable living should not really be seen as a sign of failure it is just the way things are. People and businesses need to be much more adaptable which is why multiple income streams are becoming more commonplace. Business owners starting second businesses, lecturing in the evening, sports coaching evenings and weekends. Increasingly it is about a different business model with change playing a major part. Be prepared for it.
29. Finally I want to bring some of the ideas I have covered together into a simple business model. This was intended as a new take on McCarthy’s 4 Ps of marketing Product, Price Place and Promotion which has probably been taught every marketing course since the 60’s but never seemed that relevant to me unless you are marketing tins of soup or cars or some other consumer product . The idea here is to develop a model that was more relevant to people like you running small businesses.
30. 1. Connections: All the people who have in someway entered into your business world. Connections on there own are of little value . When I send status updates out on Linkedin or Twitter not much happens.
31. 2. Conversations: The potential of these connections can only be fully exploited by engaging in direct relevant one to one conversations. When I send direct messages to people about issues I think they will be interested in or answer specific questions, then that’s when things start to happen. There are often comparisons between old and new marketing, off-line or on-line or digital and traditional. Really a lot of the principles are the same. Unless you are building relationships with people not much will happen and the best way to do this is to talk directly to them.
32. 3. Credibility Simply, people have to believe what you way, simplest way to be credible is to be honest. Ties in with the storytelling we covered earlier and the idea of building trust and reputation through collaboration.
33. 4. Creativity Presenting what you are doing in a way that will grab people’s attention and will help them remember you. Some of the ideas around content marketing and storytelling are important here.
34. 5. Content Content for you (personal and business development), for potential clients/customers and for SEO.
35. 6. Collaboration A quote from Charles Darwin (paraphrased) - “In the long history of human kind those who have learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”. A more detailed discussion of the first 4 ‘C’s of small business marketing can be found at the Mike Farmer Associates blog: http://www.freelance-marketing.co/blog/?p=526 The article was written for Cambridge Marketing Review: http://www.marketingcollege.com/news/cambridge_marketing_review_issue_1
36. 100 Content Marketing Examples available free from the Content Marketing Institute: All the people who have in someway entered into your business world. Connections on there own of little value. When I send status updates out on Linkedin or Twitter not much happens. Engagement from Scratch available free from Danny Iny at Firepole Marketing: http://www.engagementfromscratch.com/download.html New Rules for Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-New-Rules-Marketing-Podcasting/dp/0470113456
37. Presentation by: Mike Farmer Mike Farmer Associates Limited 1b Church Road Uppermill Oldham Lancashire OL3 6BJ. [email_address] www.freelance-marketing.co Tel: 01457 820910