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Experiential marketing helps you connect with customers on an emotional level–for less than you think.
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Humor can lead to a marketing grand slam–as long as it’s done right.
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Find the price point that covers your costs and provides a profit margin.
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Find the price point that covers your costs and provides a profit margin.
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This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Small Business Podcasting Sadly Underutilized
The hype over this thing called podcasting tipped long ago. So much so that you either don’t hear much about it anymore in the media or you hear that it’s so last year. While it’s true, the bloom of newness is off the podcasting rose, the usefulness as a marketing tool for the small business is better than ever.
Looking at the traditional podcast format, much like a radio show hosted by a passionate host, a lot of small business folks miss the potential for their business. Let me break down what podcasting is from a marketing point of view. It’s the use of simple tools to create multi-media content, engage prospects and customers alike, and open doors to strategic partners like never before. If any of those things sound like useful objectives, then podcasting is for you. (I won’t even mention the possibilities for using this approach to create products.)
Don’t get hung up on the radio show thing so much as on the ability to easily create great content.
Here’s how I would suggest you think about podcasting.
- A great way to feature the stories of your best customer - interview your customers and post their stories for prospects to hear. It doesn’t matter if you have a large audience for your podcast, your customers will dig the attention and you’ll get content on the fly.
- A great way to open doors - when you contact an author, industry leader, or expert of any kind with the offer to interview and feature them on your podcast, you’ll be amazed at the quality of guest you can secure and then the quality of content and exposure that can bring. If you run a print shop in the middle of Des Moines Iowa you can offer your customers and prospects access to the leading design, print and color experts from around the world - would that be valuable?
- A great way to build and solidify your strategic network - By routinely interviewing the members of your network of partners that you would like your customers to meet you can build a stronger network and make referrals to that network more easily because of the focus you can bring with an interview and audio content featured on the partner section of your site.
- A great competitive advantage - Does your competitor have an interview with the current president of your trade association on their site?
- Two for one - hold live web conferences using either interviews or presentations, record and viola, podcast episode.
Can you see how these examples might make this thing called podcasting a killer small business tool? Again, forget what it’s called, focus on the practical uses.
A few tools to get you started
- Good mic - I use a Blue Snowball USB mic
- Audio editing software - I use Garage Band on a Mac
- Audio hosting service - I use Libsyn
- Phone interviews? - I use SkypeIn with a real phone number and Call Recorder software
- WordPress plugin - Podcasting
- WordPress Blog - use to host your show episodes and RSS feed so people can get your audio via iTunes
- Complete Internet Radio Show - BlogTalkRadio
You can take this as far and as full featured as you like, but just adding basic audio interviews and recording via podcasting is an easy way to ramp up the content creation machine.
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This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Let Others Help You Sell
One of the fastest ways to build new business is to farm strategic partner opportunities. Approaching other businesses that have your same ideal customer in mind and proposing ways to cross promote, is something every small business should be pursuing. I write about this often as I feel it has so much potential and there are so many creative ways to approach it.
There is one component of this strategy that is often overlooked, but I think offers some very interesting opportunities.
What if you went out there and looked at the other things your customers need and buy and you recruited a team of partners to give you high value samples or trial products to pair with your core offerings as a way to differentiate and sweeten the deal.
Here’s an example that I’ve seen used effectively: A graphic design firm approaches a print shop and convinces them to give 500 free business cards to each of the design firm’s logo customers. Now the design firm has something to add a little spice to their marketing message. (They can also create an affiliate relationship with the print shop for further purchases.) In this example, the print shop wins because they have very little real cost in the business card printing and, let’s face it, won’t that business get new stationary and other printed items with that new logo on it?
There are hundreds of ways to approach this and, done well, a smart marketer can greatly enhance their own core offerings, create referral relationships and add passive revenue streams.
The key is to focus on value not volume. Anyone can go out and sign up for a bunch of affiliate programs and start pumping those into the mix. Or, gather up promotional materials from other businesses to insert in the products you ship. While these approaches may offer some value, I think you can make this strategy a real winner with a little bit of creative thinking.
There are hundreds of high quality partners that would love the introduction to your customers and one of the best ways to do this is through sample products and services. Think in terms of the online model. Many online companies offer 30-60 free trials. Take this same idea out to businesses in your community and start putting together a package of products and services that turn prospect’s heads.
Some idea starters:
- Be the electrician that gives its customers a free AC checkup and one free drain unclogged
- Be the marketing consultant that offers a free product trademark review with an IP attorney
- Be the accountant that gives its customers a free IT and computer network audit
- Be the retail store that gives 10 minute massages to weary shoppers
Are you starting to get some ideas on how you might attack this? Don’t stop at one pairing, go for several ways to enhance and differentiate your products and services by adding real value from willing partners.
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image: iStockphoto
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This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Creating a World Wide Rave
I had a chance to visit with David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, on a recent episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. The topic of our chat was his follow-up book, World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories.
David shares some insights into what viral marketing is and has become and why he didn’t name this book for it.
The book is peppered nicely with 37 real-life examples, mostly of small businesses you may not have heard of. Personally I think this makes the book a very practical read and brings the points he makes to life in an effective way.
Highly recommend World Wide Rave for any business trying to wrap their brains around ways to get people talking about your business in authentic and self-motivated ways.
This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by iLinc - Web and Video Conferencing that’s easy to use, affordable and powerful enough to make your online meetings really come alive.
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This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
A Lead Nurturing Technology
Lead nurturing, the act of moving a lead logically along the path of know, like and trust, takes systems thinking. Not every prospect you meet at the Chamber function is going to jump at the change to spend their money with you just because you’ve got a nice business card. Or maybe you’ve finally connected with that big fish at company X on LinkedIn, now what? You’ve got to woo them a bit, get their attention with your follow-up and, in my opinion, your stylish use of technology tools.
Recently, I started using a technology, Enthusem, that I think fits the lead nurturing bill in a very nice way.
At the most basic level Enthusem is a card sending service. You design a greeting type card or cards, input an address and the system sends your card out first class the next day.
Nothing totally new about that approach, but here are few nice differences:
- The card is very high quality stock and printing
- Card is delivered in see through vellum envelope - stands out and gives the impact of your message before opened - first class stamp
- Card carries whatever personal message you wish
But, this is where it becomes a powerful lead nurturing tool:
- Card invites reader to visit a landing page on your site
- This landing page can carry any kind of message - ebook download or audio or video greeting
- Once recipient visits the page, you get an email alerting you to follow-up
This type of systematic follow-up and nurturing step makes it easy for you to get a prospect’s attention and focus your follow-up in a timely manner on those most interested in moving to the next step. I might not use this tool in a bulk way, but as a personalized, hi-tech, hi-touch tool, it looks like a winner to me.
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Like most channels, Twitter has its good qualities and its flaws when it comes to marketing. Why don’t we look at a few from each category?
Reasons Twitter is Good for Marketing
- People can "opt in" to follow your Tweets, so your messages will be well targeted
- Social networks have taken over email in terms of popularity. Twitter is a very popular one.
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Are you providing your customers with the answers they seek? Certainly good customer service on your part should be in place (social networks like Facebook and Twitter are great for this, beyond traditional means), but I’m talking about answering them from the get go, before the customer even has to resort to customer service.
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