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	<title>Phil, Author at HeyStrategy</title>
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	<title>Phil, Author at HeyStrategy</title>
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	<item>
		<title>Any chance we could hear from people who actually have something to say?</title>
		<link>https://heystrategy.com/social-media-noise/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phil]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Jul 2022 12:16:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Marketing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Media]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://heystrategy.com/?p=21579</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>This post is aimed at: Anyone with social media accounts, particularly people who use them a lot and people who don't use them at all TLDR: Let's all encourage people with valuable things to say to share them more by a) reducing our own noise and b) taking the oxygen away from the noisy minority...</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heystrategy.com/social-media-noise/">Any chance we could hear from people who actually have something to say?</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heystrategy.com">HeyStrategy</a>.</p>
]]></description>
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<pre class="wp-block-verse"><strong>This post is aimed at:</strong> Anyone with social media accounts, particularly people who use them a lot and people who don't use them at all

<strong>TLDR</strong>: Let's all encourage people with valuable things to say to share them more by a) reducing our own noise and b) taking the oxygen away from the noisy minority who dominate social by just unfollowing them</pre>



<p>A client said something interesting in a marketing session this week, which I couldn&#8217;t agree more with:</p>



<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote><p>&#8220;The problem with social media is it&#8217;s full of idiots with huge audiences spouting shite.&#8221;</p><cite>Someone who shall remain nameless (but has quite a large audience!), 2022</cite></blockquote></figure>



<p>This was in the context of trying to help people with a story or a mission to do some good reach a wider audience, and our conversation was around how to do that when the channels seem saturated. His frustration, which I entirely share, is that we seem as a society to be listening to the people who shout the loudest, which is stopping us hearing from people with something worthwhile to say. </p>



<p>Whilst I don&#8217;t think this is either entirely limited to, or entirely attributable to, social media (the breakdown of attention spans is a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/02/attention-span-focus-screens-apps-smartphones-social-media" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">much bigger, really interesting topic </a>with some huge implications for marketing) in this context it&#8217;s social media that&#8217;s important, because it&#8217;s where most people&#8217;s attention is at the moment, rightly or wrongly, so for people who have a message to share that&#8217;s where the broadest audience is.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">We all know there is too much noise on social</h3>



<p>Now, it&#8217;s not new to suggest that there is too much noise on social media &#8211; <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/the-war-on-noise-2012-11?r=US&amp;IR=T" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">people have been saying that for over a decade</a> (incidentally I really identify with a quote from that article: &#8220;<em>Marketers suck. Including me.</em>&#8220;) But the question that most people seem in response to that noise is &#8220;how can I cut through it?&#8221; (just google &#8220;tips for standing out from the social media noise&#8221;), and surely in that case you&#8217;re just becoming part of the problem. We are ALL convinced that what we have to say is more important, that it&#8217;s the signal rather than the noise, but&#8230;is it really? No, come on&#8230;really?</p>



<p>I like to use &#8216;in the pub&#8217; analogies with my clients, and it&#8217;s particularly apt here. We&#8217;re in a situation where we&#8217;re in a pub <em>filled</em> with people loudly proclaiming their own thoughts and opinions, veering from completely fucking inane (&#8220;hey, look, I&#8217;ve got a dog, look at my dog, my dog is wearing a hat, hey, hey, look at me, now look at my dog again, now me&#8221;) through misinformed and misguided (but let&#8217;s not disappear down the Brexit sewerhole) to actively offensive, all with a meaty side of dull as dishwater. In this terrible pub, there are lots of people who may want to discuss something important to them &#8211; but faced with the deluge of nonsense they stay quiet and eventually leave.</p>



<p>This terrible metaphor is actually a real problem &#8211; lots of people are deciding to remove themselves from social platforms, and anecdotally it seems to me that they are often the people you would want to hear from. It seems to me that as more moderate, thoughtful people make a moderate, thoughtful decision to spend their time and attention somewhere less awful, the social platforms become&#8230;well, less moderate, less thoughtful, more awful.</p>



<h3 class="kt-adv-heading_bca5c7-6c wp-block-kadence-advancedheading" data-kb-block="kb-adv-heading_bca5c7-6c">But what can we do about it?</h3>



<p>To be clear, I&#8217;m very much in favour of everyone being able to post (and say) what they want, when they want. I just don&#8217;t want to have to read it, and I don&#8217;t see why it should have equal weight with the opinions of someone who actually knows what they are talking about. </p>



<p>Obviously it would be lovely if social media platforms figured out some way of doing this. Maybe some sort of test that you have to pass before you can post? (That&#8217;s not entirely a joke!) But given that it is far from clear about <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/more-content-moderation-not-always-better/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">whether these companies can, or even should, moderate even potentially harmful content</a>, there is no chance whatsoever of them telling some their most active users to, without putting too fine a point on it, shut the fuck up. </p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">6 things I&#8217;m going to try</h3>



<p>I&#8217;m fully aware that my opinions in no way matter to this, but it still felt like it was worth saying, and here are a few things that I&#8217;m going to do to see if it helps. If you feel like joining me that would be great.</p>



<ol class="wp-block-list"><li>Before I post, and I mean EVERY TIME, I&#8217;m going to ask myself three questions: &#8220;who is this for, what will they gain from it, and would it hurt them if I didn&#8217;t post it?&#8221; If in doubt, I&#8217;ll err on the side of keeping quiet.</li><li>Start identifying who I&#8217;m posting for. This ties in with some things I&#8217;m thinking about for my PhD, and it just makes sense really &#8211; not everything is for everyone, and we could easily make what we are posting and writing more targeted to audiences who will actually find it useful.</li><li>Alongside that, I&#8217;m going to join the TLDR gang. You might have seen this on articles, and like me you might have thought it was an irritating affectation. But&#8230; I was wrong, and you probably are too. <a href="https://www.howtogeek.com/435266/what-does-tldr-mean-and-how-do-you-use-it/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Here&#8217;s why it&#8217;s useful</a>, and if we tied this in with identifying audiences it could really reduce the noise.</li><li>Revisit my overall approach to digital presence. I&#8217;ve been working through an <a href="https://www.open.edu/openlearn/education-development/the-digital-scholar/content-section-overview" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Open University Course called &#8216;the digital scholar</a>&#8216; which is a bit dated but has some really interesting thoughts on how to be more open and interconnected when sharing ideas. It&#8217;s something I need to be better at, and I&#8217;m looking at <a href="https://tomcritchlow.com/writing/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tom Critchlow</a> as an example of how it&#8217;s done really well &#8211; interesting, curated, thoughtful, interlinked online content but without an overbearing social presence</li><li>Actively look for people who I know have worthwhile opinions on a topic and encourage them to share them, whether that&#8217;s on social, through blogging, podcasts, whatever. There are lots of people who don&#8217;t contribute because they think they haven&#8217;t got anything valuable to say, and I haven&#8217;t been proactive encouraging them to speak up.</li><li>Cull the noisy minority. Not a literal culling, most of them aren&#8217;t <em>that</em> bad&#8230; But maybe if every time someone posted something banal, pointless or stupid they lost a chunk of their connections or followers that might make them start to consider their posts more carefully. We can dream, anyway! If nothing else, over time this will mean that I personally have to wade through less mindless drivel, so it&#8217;s a win regardless.</li></ol>



<p>It&#8217;s not much of a manifesto, but until I think of something better these might help me feel that I&#8217;m doing my bit.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heystrategy.com/social-media-noise/">Any chance we could hear from people who actually have something to say?</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heystrategy.com">HeyStrategy</a>.</p>
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		<title>A New Direction</title>
		<link>https://heystrategy.com/a-new-direction/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phil]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Jan 2022 12:39:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Strategy]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://heystrategy.com/?p=21559</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;m really excited to be starting 2022 with a new direction and a new business model. Or to be more accurate, an old business model that I&#8217;m going back to! It&#8217;s taken a couple of years of slow changes to get here, but I&#8217;m back to doing purely consultancy work, with no outsourced marketing work...</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heystrategy.com/a-new-direction/">A New Direction</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heystrategy.com">HeyStrategy</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>I&#8217;m really excited to be starting 2022 with a new direction and a new business model. Or to be more accurate, an old business model that I&#8217;m going back to! It&#8217;s taken a couple of years of slow changes to get here, but I&#8217;m back to doing purely consultancy work, with no outsourced marketing work for people, and I couldn&#8217;t be happier. Focussing on short-term, high-impact projects with companies is what I&#8217;m good at, and what makes me happy, and I&#8217;m really looking forward to being able to do more of it.</p>



<p>When I started on my own in 2007 it was as a &#8216;business services&#8217; provider &#8211; basically what I think should actually have been called a VA, with a very practical remit. By 2011 when I set up as a limited company, that was already shifting to be much more of a consultancy model, which suited my knowledge and experience (and temperament) a bit better. By 2015 I decided to move more towards an agency model, combining consultancy with more practical, hands-on services like design, web development and content creation.</p>



<p>Partially this was driven by a desire to build a team to work with, but probably more so because I was so sick of poor quality delivery from so-called marketers that I wanted to try to do things a bit differently, and see if I could build an agency that did things properly. We got some of that really spot on, and some of it not quite so spot on, and learnt a lot doing it. One of the things that I personally discovered was that as well as being borderline unmanageable I&#8217;m also a poor manager myself! </p>



<p>Anyway, things change again, and now I&#8217;ve moved back to a much more hands-off role &#8211; Josh and Julietta are set up as their own independent companies who I still work closely with, but with a clearer separation of &#8216;what to do and why&#8217; (me) and &#8216;how to actually do it!&#8217; (other people!)</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">So, what am I actually doing now?</h2>



<p>From October I&#8217;m going to be working on a PhD at the University of the West of Scotland, which I&#8217;m hugely looking forward to. It will be an opportunity to look more systematically about how small businesses and entrepreneurs are supported and advised, and identify what exactly they need to help them grow. </p>



<p>I&#8217;ll still be working with businesses directly, both through business support programmes and directly, in three roles:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list"><li>Non-executive directorships</li><li>Outsourced marketing director / manager support</li><li>Short consultancy projects on strategy and planning &#8211; either business-wide, or marketing specific</li></ul>



<p>So if you need some additional support with marketing and strategy you should still feel free to get in touch and see if it&#8217;s something I can help with.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heystrategy.com/a-new-direction/">A New Direction</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heystrategy.com">HeyStrategy</a>.</p>
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		<title>Writing Business Proposals</title>
		<link>https://heystrategy.com/writing-business-proposals/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phil]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Nov 2019 13:41:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sales]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://nosy-carriage.flywheelsites.com/?p=541</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;ve had to write up a couple of proposals for new work in the last few weeks. Here&#8217;s my quick tips for writing winning proposals. 1. Understand the Brief Let&#8217;s start simple! Make sure you&#8217;ve read the RFP (or RFQ, or brief, or whatever they have called it), because you&#8217;re going to need to make...</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heystrategy.com/writing-business-proposals/">Writing Business Proposals</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heystrategy.com">HeyStrategy</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>I&#8217;ve had to write up a couple of proposals for new work in the last few weeks. Here&#8217;s my quick tips for writing winning proposals.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Understand the Brief</h3>



<p>Let&#8217;s start simple! Make sure you&#8217;ve read the RFP (or RFQ, or brief, or whatever they have called it), because you&#8217;re going to need to make sure you tick all the boxes. Often these are in pretty standard language and asking for standard things, but make sure you know exactly what is being asked for. If you aren&#8217;t sure, don&#8217;t be afraid to ask for clarification.</p>



<p>It could well be that there isn&#8217;t a written brief, particularly if you&#8217;re preparing a proposal for a cold or semi-warm lead. In that case, I&#8217;d strongly suggest writing a single page brief for them before you launch into the proposal. Share it with the customer, check that you have understood what they are looking for &#8211; it makes you look like you know what you are doing, and as an added bonus you get to write the brief in a way that you can write a great proposal for!</p>



<p>Important! You need to be 100% sure at this stage that the brief is one you can deliver against. The bid / no bid decision is perhaps the most important part of any proposal process &#8211; don&#8217;t waste everyone&#8217;s time by bidding if you aren&#8217;t sure you can deliver.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Now answer the brief!</h3>



<p>This is pretty obvious, but weirdly doesn&#8217;t always happen. Make sure your proposal EXACTLY answers the brief. If you&#8217;re straying from it, even if that is adding extra value, make sure you flag this clearly and explain why you think it&#8217;s right to make that change. I like to turn the questions / aims / objectives / timeframes from the brief or RFP into answers in the proposal, so I know I&#8217;m covering everything they asked for.</p>



<p>For example, if a brief states that the objective of the project is to &#8220;<em>increase visitors from natural search from 100 to 200 unique users by [date]</em>&#8220;, somewhere in your proposal it could say something like &#8220;O<em>ur proposed approach to this is designed to give the best likelihood of doubling organic traffic (visitors from natural search) to the website by [date]. We have successfully used this approach in [project details] and have prepared the workflow and milestones that we would use to recreate that approach here&#8230;</em> &#8221; And so on. It&#8217;s not complicated, but if you do it well it&#8217;s easy to write a proposal that 100% meets the brief, and which to the customer will sound like you&#8217;re reading their mind. Make sure you are changing the phrasing though and including each element where it makes sense in your proposal rather than exactly as they have it in the brief, otherwise they will see what you&#8217;ve done!</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Make sure the focus is on the customer</h3>



<p>If I was only giving 1 tip, this would be it. If the first ten pages of your proposal are standard templates which explain who you are and how amazing you are, you&#8217;re losing the customer from the word go.</p>



<p>Check your pronouns &#8211; if it&#8217;s more &#8216;I / we&#8217; than &#8216;you&#8217;, you might not be focused on the customer enough. Likewise count up how many times your company name is mentioned versus their company name &#8211; if it&#8217;s about the customer (and pretty much every business will say they are &#8220;customer-centric&#8221;) then just write about the bloody customer!</p>



<p>When you do need to write about yourself (and you will have to in order to talk about your competence to fulfil the brief, and the advantage you have over competitors), make sure you link it back to the customer.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. Write, Test and Rewrite</h3>



<p>Simple one here &#8211; don&#8217;t submit until at least v.3. There are always improvements. If you think you&#8217;ve got it perfect first time, email it to me and I&#8217;ll tear it to pieces for you. Ideally get someone else in the team to check it and test your assumptions.</p>



<p>Focus your testing and rewrites in particular on objectives, deliverables, timescales and costs.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. More Time = Better Proposals</h3>



<p>Yeah no shit! But if you don&#8217;t know what percentage of proposals you typically win, first work that out. Then allocate a value to your time. Then allocate an appropriate amount of time to the proposal. So let&#8217;s say you win 1-in-4, and you value your time at £50 per hour. If the proposal you are working on is worth £5000, and you&#8217;re prepared to allocate 10% of the value to the cost of winning it, that gives you a nominal proposal value of £500 (10 hours). Of course, you need to proportion that across the contracts you aren&#8217;t winning to, leaving you 2.5 hours to work on this one.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>(In this example, you need to prepare 4 proposals in order to be successful with 1 &#8211; spending 2.5 hours on each would give 10 hours in total, with a nominal value of £500 at £50 per hour. If the proposal you win is worth £5000, that&#8217;s a 10% cost-of-acquisition &#8211; ignoring, of course, anything you&#8217;ve had to spend to generate the opportunity to bid for the work)</em></p>



<p>Yes, I know these figures aren&#8217;t real, and in many cases there&#8217;s no actual £ cost to preparing a proposal. If these nominal calculations don&#8217;t work though, your model isn&#8217;t scalable and probably isn&#8217;t even sustainable. Make these numbers work for you.</p>



<p>Then, spend longer, work harder, work smarter, make sure each proposal is better than the last.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">6. Be Different</h3>



<p>I can&#8217;t stress this enough. Something about your proposal needs to stand out. Whether it&#8217;s cost, presentation, delivery, extras, tone&#8230;or all of them! It&#8217;s unlikely yours will be the only proposal they are considering, so make sure yours stands out.</p>



<ol class="wp-block-list"><li>Send a video instead of a written proposal</li><li>If you think everyone else&#8217;s proposal is going to be 100 pages, find a way to get yours onto 2 pages.</li><li>Make it too good to refuse (&#8220;<em>If we don&#8217;t deliver as promised, we&#8217;ll not only give you your money back, we&#8217;ll give you 50% on top</em>&#8220;)</li><li>Shock them (&#8220;<em>All of your competitors are fucking boring and lazy, and there&#8217;s a risk you&#8217;re going to be the same. Not with us</em>&#8220;)</li><li>Don&#8217;t do any of these &#8211; find your own thing.</li></ol>



<p>Now, these are risky, and you need to be comfortable with that risk. Being different increases the likelihood that the reader won&#8217;t like it&#8230; but it also increases the likelihood that they will like it! It depends on your knowing your audience and finding a way to stand out in a positive way.</p>



<p>You know the saying &#8220;<em>nobody got fired for buying IBM</em>&#8220;? There is a degree of truth in that, and some customers will always be looking for the safe option. But unless you are IBM, it wouldn&#8217;t matter how safe your proposal was, you still wouldn&#8217;t win it &#8211; so on balance I think it&#8217;s always better to take the risk and try to stand out. Lots (and lots, and lots) of other people would disagree with me though. To put it another way, there&#8217;s a great bit of dialogue from Red Dwarf:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"><p>There&#8217;s an old cat saying, &#8220;It&#8217;s better to live one hour as a tiger than a whole lifetime as a worm.&#8221;</p><cite>Cat</cite></blockquote>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"><p>There&#8217;s an old human saying, &#8220;Who&#8217;s ever heard of a worm skin rug?&#8221;</p><cite>Rimmer</cite></blockquote>



<p>Choose which suits you best!</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">7. Focus on Presentation</h3>



<p>Sometimes that point of difference can just be visual, and often that&#8217;s a safer way of doing it. There&#8217;s some <a href="https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/how-to-write-business-proposal" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">good tips on formatting and presentation over on Hubspot</a>, and all I want to add is to remember to get make sure your proposal gets your brand across properly. </p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heystrategy.com/writing-business-proposals/">Writing Business Proposals</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heystrategy.com">HeyStrategy</a>.</p>
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		<title>Marketing your business &#8211; learn from other people&#8217;s mistakes!</title>
		<link>https://heystrategy.com/marketing-your-business-learn-from-other-peoples-mistakes/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phil]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Jul 2016 15:58:32 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Marketing]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://nosy-carriage.flywheelsites.com/?p=582</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>The number one mistake lots of people make when trying to market their business is starting by talking about yourself and your product rather than talking about your customer</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heystrategy.com/marketing-your-business-learn-from-other-peoples-mistakes/">Marketing your business &#8211; learn from other people&#8217;s mistakes!</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heystrategy.com">HeyStrategy</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The number one mistake lots of people make when trying to market their business is starting by talking about yourself and your product rather than talking about your customer, but that’s an article in itself!</p>
<p>So these are seven common mistakes that we see companies making (in no particular order of severity). These mistakes are more strategic than tactical, because the number of practical mistakes in marketing would be a much longer article, but the conceptual flaws here often underlie a lot of the obvious mis-steps that we see businesses making.</p>
<h3><strong>1. Don’t mistake ‘Promotion’ for ‘Marketing’</strong></h3>
<p>A lot of the time when businesses talk about “marketing themselves”, they actually mean “promoting themselves” – i.e. trying to tell potential customers about their products or services. Marketing is about more than who can shout the loudest, it’s about making sure that what you’re shouting about is actually what people are interested in (and therefore possibly willing to part with their cash for!) Promotion is just one part of the “4 P’s” marketing theory, along with Product, Place and Price (and many marketers add a fifth, overarching “P” for People). <a href="http://www.shell-livewire.org/home/business-library/marketing-and-promotion/marketing-planning/marketing-mix-4ps/">http://www.shell-livewire.org/home/business-library/marketing-and-promotion/marketing-planning/marketing-mix-4ps/</a></p>
<p>Before a company can successfully market a product or service, they have to make sure that all of the other elements are right for their potential customers. If they can do that, promoting themselves is much easier, but if they get any of the other elements wrong then money spent on promotion can easily be wasted.</p>
<p>It’s very common for a business to put an advert out, in the local press, for example, spending a significant part or all of their marketing budget, and seeing little or nothing in the way of return. This means one of two things: either they chose the wrong promotional channel (“the paper is rubbish, I never get anything from it”), which they wouldn’t have done if they’d properly understood their target audience, or they didn’t properly work through the 4 P’s before they placed the advert. A company could place a brilliantly conceived and designed advert in a widely read magazine, designed by a talented artist and with wonderful copy from a professional writer, but if their price is way more than anyone is prepared to pay, the advert is wasted. Whatever the promotional channel, this concept applies – get your message right before you start telling people about it! Which leads us to:</p>
<h3><strong>2. Don’t underestimate the amount of noise out there</strong></h3>
<p>Even if you get your message exactly spot on, your potential customers are being so bombarded with promotional material that the likelihood of them playing attention to you is pretty low. Just think about the number of companies who are trying to promote themselves to you every day – adverts on TV, in the press, in your magazines, on the radio, on facebook and google and on loads of other websites you visit, companies trying to reach you through twitter, snapchat, Instagram, billboards on the side of the road, shops displaying offers in their windows, emails in your inbox! It’s a hurricane of noise over which it’s very difficult for a small business to be heard. This article in the Guardian talks about how it was15 years ago, and arguably it’s only got worse since. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/nov/19/advertising.marketingandpr">http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/nov/19/advertising.marketingandpr</a></p>
<p>For a business to have any hope at all of getting a customer’s attention, they have to work extremely hard, and they have to keep working. But more than that, they have to be different. And if you have to choose between being the best and being different, arguably being different is better, because if you can’t get people to pay attention to you, you can’t get them to buy from you, so they’ll never know how good you are! It’s not enough to put a few tweets out and write a story for your website, you have to be more interesting, more challenging, more active than your competition. For some inspiration, check out <a href="http://www.creativeguerrillamarketing.com/guerrilla-marketing/50-guerrilla-marketing-tactics-you-should-be-using/">http://www.creativeguerrillamarketing.com/guerrilla-marketing/50-guerrilla-marketing-tactics-you-should-be-using/</a>. I can’t stress enough how much energy you have to put in to marketing.</p>
<h3><strong>3. Your marketing is never “done”</strong></h3>
<p>As we’ve already seen, marketing is about more than telling people about your products and services, it’s about understanding your customers and making sure that you give them what they need, so until you run out of potential customers you’re going to need to think about marketing! However, there can sometimes be a tendency with promotional activity to do a bit, then stop, then wonder why there’s a drop in sales. There are two facets to this. The first is plain laziness &amp; complacency. There are a number of businesses that I’ve worked to produce a marketing plan and who see an upturn in business because of the promotional activity we support. They decide not to use us regularly (which is fine!) but then I’ll get a call 12 months later for some more support (which is great!). When we meet again, they will tell me how enquiries have dried up, how the recession is killing their business and the marketplace is dead, how people just aren’t buying, and when I ask what they’ve been doing to promote themselves the answer is always the same: nothing. Often they are literally sitting in the office waiting for the phone to ring (and in one memorable occasion they were waiting for the phone to ring despite their number being out of date on their website and all their marketing materials). We do some work to re-energise them, or they pay us to do the work directly, and unsurprisingly the enquiries start to roll in again. The basic message to these types of businesses is get off your arse, get out there and start telling people what you do. Any time you spend sitting in the office waiting for people to call is wasted, and it’s basically down to laziness.</p>
<p>Luckily, that laziness is relatively uncommon, but the second, related facet is more common, and it’s the somewhat natural tendency to lose focus on marketing and promotion as you get busier. It can be time consuming for a small business to sort a website, send some emails, maybe do some flyers, sales letters, or cold calling, start doing a little bit on social media or pay someone to run some ads for your business, and often all of this will be done by the owner or office staff who might not have any real understanding of marketing. If their promotional efforts generate some enquires, then, it’s understandable that they might start focussing on their “real” job – actually delivering their product or service. Time and time again I see businesses get really busy and immediately start to neglect their marketing, and time and time again those businesses eventually run out of new enquiries. If they are smart or lucky, they will have enough momentum to start promoting themselves again and bring in another new set of enquiries, but I’ve seen businesses fail because of this “feast or famine” cycle. It’s a truism, but the best time for marketing activity is when you’re already busy – that means building time for marketing into your business, rather than trying to do it on top of everything else.</p>
<h3><strong>4. Don’t forget that time has a cost</strong></h3>
<p>A real reason for small businesses struggling to spend enough time on marketing as they grow is that they forget that time has a cost. Often in smaller companies the responsibility for marketing falls on the owner or director – often the same person who’s responsible for everything else as well, including actually doing the work! When the level of work is low, that’s okay, because any time spent on marketing is valuable, but the mistake comes when that time is not accounted for in pricing. If the business owner has to spend three hours networking to get a sale, then the profit in that sale has to cover the cost of those three hours. If it doesn’t then when the company gets busy, the owner has to do the three hours <em>on top</em> of everything else, they can’t afford to pay somebody else to do it for them. This is unbelievably common, and it’s probably the main reason that entrepreneurs start to get that crazy, over-busy, slightly wild look in their eyes. Luckily, it’s an easy one to solve. Work out how much per hour the time of the person doing your marketing is worth, and keep track of it. Add it to your physical marketing spend (on websites, design, printing, adverts, consultancy) and you’ll know how much it costs you to generate each sale, on average. If you then know how much an average sale generates, you’ve got the key data available that allows businesses to grow – it’s probably the most effective single thing you can do as a result of reading this article.</p>
<h3><strong>5. Don’t forget to improve conversion rates</strong></h3>
<p>The second most effective is to start paying just as much attention to the number of sales you make as the number of enquiries you generate. We see a lot of clients who have an overwhelming desire to get more leads, and their mantra is “more google ads, more website visits, more social media posts, more networking and exhibitions” – in short, they are always looking to out more in to the top of their sales funnel, in the expectation that they will get more sales at the end. This is on the whole true, but if your conversion rate isn’t good, then you can expend a huge amount more effort to see a small increase in sales. We can see this with a simple example:</p>
<p>Company A sells 10 gadgets each week. To sell those 10, they need to attract 1000 visitors to their website – 5% of visitors make an enquiry (so 50 enquiries), and 20% of enquiries turn in to sales, so 10 sales.  To double their sales, the company needs to double their website visitors, so we somehow have to find another 1000 people each week. However, if the company can improve their two conversion rates, they can hit that target without any new visitors! A 50% improvement in the number of visitors who make an enquiry would give 75 enquiries per week, and if they combine that a 50% improvement in how many of those enquiries turn in to sales (so 30% of enquires buy, instead of 20%), they would sell 22.5 gadgets per week – more than doubling their previous sales!</p>
<p>This is a simplistic example, and it makes light of the hard work that would need to go in to improving those conversion rates. But often that work on improving the sales funnel (through better marketing processes) is way, way cheaper than trying to reach more and more potential customers.</p>
<h3><strong>6. Don’t choose a promotional channel “because everyone is doing it” and 7. </strong><strong>Make sure that you are marketing today (and tomorrow) – not for yesterday</strong></h3>
<p>The final two mistakes are very different but share the same root causes. It’s increasingly hard to know where marketing budget is best spent, and everyone has an opinion. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard “you’ve got to be on Twitter because it’s the best way to promote your business!” Well here’s the truth – it isn’t and you don’t. For some businesses it’s great, for some it’s terrible, and the only business you should care about is yours. Replace ‘Twitter’ with ‘Facebook / Linkedin / Myspace / Snapchat / Adwords / the Wirral Globe website / beer mats down the pub’ and you’ve got a substantial portion of all the well-meaning but pretty hapless marketing advice from the last four or five years (well, maybe not the last two so much!). Choosing a marketing channel because everyone else seems to be doing it is the <em>worst way</em> to set your marketing strategy. Were you choose to promote yourself should be based on your customers, your products, and your budget. Everyone else’s opinion is irrelevant, and the only reason people listen to it and then spend time and money chasing down marketing dead-ends is a fear of missing out on opportunities.</p>
<p>That’s not to say that some of these opportunities aren’t right for you though – there are more options available than ever before, and it’s an exciting time in marketing for those business who ‘get it’. However, the other side of the same fear coin is sticking with old, ineffective marketing activities because they’ve always worked in the past. Local paper ads are the prime example of this, and I see companies spending tens of thousands on largely ineffective ads because they’ve done it that way for twenty years. Again, that’s not to say that local papers can’t be a valuable tool, for the right product and at a reasonable cost, but it is pretty clear that it’s not as effective as it once was, and wishing for the ‘glory days’ of the Yellow Pages, and business name starting with AAA, and some nice classified ads isn’t going to bring them back! The worst example of this I’ve seen is a retail business who primarily sold via newspaper ads, who had shrunk from a turnover of £10m+ in the late 1990’s to under £1m today. They didn’t have a website, because the owner thought it was a waste of money. He couldn’t understand why his business had shrunk!</p>
<p>If you think you might be making some (or all!) of these mistakes, we&#8217;d love to help you! <a href="#contact">Contact us</a> to start getting your marketing right.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heystrategy.com/marketing-your-business-learn-from-other-peoples-mistakes/">Marketing your business &#8211; learn from other people&#8217;s mistakes!</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heystrategy.com">HeyStrategy</a>.</p>
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		<title>Social Engagement</title>
		<link>https://heystrategy.com/social-engagement/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phil]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Feb 2014 11:41:04 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Marketing]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://nosy-carriage.flywheelsites.com/?p=544</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>There is a tendency, particularly in smaller businesses, to ask "how can social media increase my sales?". In most cases this is exactly the wrong question</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heystrategy.com/social-engagement/">Social Engagement</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heystrategy.com">HeyStrategy</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>A lot of our work is trying to help businesses understand how social media can help them grow their business. There is a bit of a tendency, particularly in smaller businesses, to immediately ask &#8220;how can social media increase my sales?&#8221;. In most cases this is exactly the wrong question to be asking, but it&#8217;s not always easy to persuade people that they have to invest time and expertise, and sometimes money, in creating a community, growing a network, or providing value before they can think about a return.</p>
<h3>The Orchard at Tesco</h3>
<p>With that in mind, I was interested to get an invitation some time ago to take part in Tesco&#8217;s new social engagement programme, called &#8216;the Orchard&#8217; &#8211; <a href="http://orchard.tesco.com/">http://orchard.tesco.com/</a> &#8211; I must admit, I wasn&#8217;t really not sold on the name! The programme, on the other hand, looks promising. Basically, once you&#8217;re signed up Tesco send you free or discounted products, and ask you to share and review those discounts and products. Your social activity is then graded and if you share enough then you&#8217;re invited to take part in more studies.</p>
<h3>Will people really bother?</h3>
<p>So Tesco are obviously taking social media very seriously, and are willing to invest significantly in trying to create a buzz. I&#8217;ve got two problems with it though:</p>
<ol>
<li>It&#8217;s pretty time consuming. I used the vouchers they sent me, shared some with my friends and family, and enjoyed the food. But I didn&#8217;t review it, partly because the guidelines about what make a good post are so specific that it felt difficult to write naturally, but mainly because I don&#8217;t believe that my audience on any channel are in the least bit interested in what I think about a Tesco healthy living chicken dish! It just wasn&#8217;t worth the time and effort in order to get invited to take part in another programme that might yield another voucher worth maybe £2.50. Maybe I&#8217;m a bit mercenary, but for me the rewards weren&#8217;t sufficient to keep me involved.</li>
<li>It feels very forced. My approach is that people should <strong>want</strong> to share your content or talk about what you&#8217;re doing, rather than feeling that they have to. I can see why the concept of &#8216;gamifying&#8217; social activity might work for companies where the product is fairly dull, but I think that consumers are wise enough to take these effectively &#8216;bought&#8217; shares with a large pinch of salt. Personally if I&#8217;d been designing this programme and investing obviously significant sums of money, I would have been looking for how to reward people who were doing this naturally &#8211; a &#8216;thanks for sharing&#8217; rather than an &#8216;incentive to share&#8217;.</li>
</ol>
<h3>Any Lessons for Smaller Businesses?</h3>
<p>It must be great to be a major corporation with money to chuck at these sorts of things, but most of us don&#8217;t have the luxury to create our own sharing platform! My suggestion would be to take the idea of giving people your product for free or discounts to share, but I would be looking to select those people, choosing those who already have an audience or already use the product (or preferably both). I also wouldn&#8217;t make further participation so explicitly conditional on social activity &#8211; to a degree, the scale at which Tesco has launched actually works against them, and there&#8217;s an opportunity for smaller companies to do this smarter and better.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heystrategy.com/social-engagement/">Social Engagement</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heystrategy.com">HeyStrategy</a>.</p>
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		<title>Making time to market yourself</title>
		<link>https://heystrategy.com/making-time-to-market-yourself-as-a-freelancer/</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Phil]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 19 Dec 2013 18:51:58 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marketing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freelancing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Time Management]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://nosy-carriage.flywheelsites.com/?p=384</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>We&#8217;ve recently redesigned our website. It took us many, many times longer than the planned, efficient work we do for our clients and at every step, we seemed to lose focus on what we wanted to say. Lots of consultants seem to have this problem &#8211; it can be difficult to make time to focus...</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heystrategy.com/making-time-to-market-yourself-as-a-freelancer/">Making time to market yourself</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heystrategy.com">HeyStrategy</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>We&#8217;ve recently redesigned our website. It took us many, many times longer than the planned, efficient work we do for our clients and at every step, we seemed to lose focus on what we wanted to say. Lots of consultants seem to have this problem &#8211; it can be difficult to make time to focus on your own marketing / web design / whatever, and even when you do, often you demand far higher standards of yourself than you would of a client. So, learning from our experience, how can you get better at talking about yourself when you run your own business or work as a consultant or freelancer?</p>
<h2>1. Just do it, already</h2>
<p>Its really easy to put your own work to the back of the queue, to not give it your full attention, or to put it off because you&#8217;ve been working all day, you&#8217;re knackered, and you want a break. If you&#8217;re doing your own marketing and you don&#8217;t make the time to do it eventually you will be short of clients and wishing you had.</p>
<p>The majority of our clients come through referrals, but I&#8217;m well aware that I have to have the basics of my ongoing marketing (website, emails, business cards, some advertising, social media activity etc) in place ready for the inevitable dry spell. As a consultant, you have to take responsibility for your own success.</p>
<p>30 seconds to spare? Log onto Twitter and tell your followers what you&#8217;re working on. If you&#8217;ve got 5 minutes, phone a sales prospect. If you&#8217;ve got 10 minutes, why not write a blog post? If you&#8217;ve got a couple of hours, review your business cards / flyers / sales letters / whatever. You get the idea</p>
<h2>2. It doesn&#8217;t have to be perfect</h2>
<p>This is what I&#8217;ve really struggled with &#8211; you start working on something, get to a point where you&#8217;re reasonably happy, but delay finishing it because it&#8217;s &#8220;not quite right&#8221;. It&#8217;s never going to be. Make it as good as you can in the available time and get it out there. You can always go back and correct it, or do it differently / better next time.</p>
<h2>3. Give yourself a brief</h2>
<p>I suppose this is only really true for bigger and more complex pieces of work, but having a clear outline of what you are trying to achieve with your marketing activity can really drive you into actually doing it. Think about where you want to be, work out what you need to do to get there, and then figure out what resources you have to do it. Then go back to point 1!</p>
<h2>4. Bite the bullet and outsource</h2>
<p>If you really can&#8217;t make any progress, you might have to accept that you need to focus on working for clients and generating income. Ask people you trust for recommendations for people who can help you achieve your marketing goals. After all, as a consultant you are a business and sometimes businesses have to spend money &#8211; you can&#8217;t bootstrap all the time&#8230;</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heystrategy.com/making-time-to-market-yourself-as-a-freelancer/">Making time to market yourself</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heystrategy.com">HeyStrategy</a>.</p>
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