A client said something interesting in a marketing session this week, which I couldn’t agree more with:

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.

Whilst I don’t think this is either entirely limited to, or entirely attributable to, social media (the breakdown of attention spans is a much bigger, really interesting topic with some huge implications for marketing) in this context it’s social media that’s important, because it’s where most people’s attention is at the moment, rightly or wrongly, so for people who have a message to share that’s where the broadest audience is.

We all know there is too much noise on social

Now, it’s not new to suggest that there is too much noise on social media – people have been saying that for over a decade (incidentally I really identify with a quote from that article: “Marketers suck. Including me.“) But the question that most people seem in response to that noise is “how can I cut through it?” (just google “tips for standing out from the social media noise”), and surely in that case you’re just becoming part of the problem. We are ALL convinced that what we have to say is more important, that it’s the signal rather than the noise, but…is it really? No, come on…really?

I like to use ‘in the pub’ analogies with my clients, and it’s particularly apt here. We’re in a situation where we’re in a pub filled with people loudly proclaiming their own thoughts and opinions, veering from completely fucking inane (“hey, look, I’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”) through misinformed and misguided (but let’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 – but faced with the deluge of nonsense they stay quiet and eventually leave.

This terrible metaphor is actually a real problem – 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…well, less moderate, less thoughtful, more awful.

But what can we do about it?

To be clear, I’m very much in favour of everyone being able to post (and say) what they want, when they want. I just don’t want to have to read it, and I don’t see why it should have equal weight with the opinions of someone who actually knows what they are talking about.

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’s not entirely a joke!) But given that it is far from clear about whether these companies can, or even should, moderate even potentially harmful content, 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.

6 things I’m going to try

I’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’m going to do to see if it helps. If you feel like joining me that would be great.

1. Before I post, and I mean EVERY TIME, I’m going to ask myself three questions: “who is this for, what will they gain from it, and would it hurt them if I didn’t post it?” If in doubt, I’ll err on the side of keeping quiet.
2. Start identifying who I’m posting for. This ties in with some things I’m thinking about for my PhD, and it just makes sense really – 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.
3. Alongside that, I’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… I was wrong, and you probably are too. Here’s why it’s useful, and if we tied this in with identifying audiences it could really reduce the noise.
4. Revisit my overall approach to digital presence. I’ve been working through an Open University Course called ‘the digital scholar‘ which is a bit dated but has some really interesting thoughts on how to be more open and interconnected when sharing ideas. It’s something I need to be better at, and I’m looking at Tom Critchlow as an example of how it’s done really well – interesting, curated, thoughtful, interlinked online content but without an overbearing social presence
5. Actively look for people who I know have worthwhile opinions on a topic and encourage them to share them, whether that’s on social, through blogging, podcasts, whatever. There are lots of people who don’t contribute because they think they haven’t got anything valuable to say, and I haven’t been proactive encouraging them to speak up.
6. Cull the noisy minority. Not a literal culling, most of them aren’t that bad… 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’s a win regardless.

It’s not much of a manifesto, but until I think of something better these might help me feel that I’m doing my bit.

The post Any chance we could hear from people who actually have something to say? appeared first on HeyStrategy.

Recently I was faced with a dilemma. During my habitual trawl through Twitter, I read an interesting Hootsuite post about writing a social media policy for staff. This happens to be an element of one of the services we provide to our clients – it’s important to have guidelines so that staff are clear about what they can and can’t use the company name for on social media and help to avoid PR slip ups.

I thought the article was a good read and was about to retweet when the thought crossed my mind – if I share the “secrets” to some of our consultancy advice, does this undermine the services we charge for?

My hesitation lasted only a few seconds – firstly our company ethos is centred around a desire to be helpful.

Secondly, if a client wanted to google “social media policy” and write one themselves they could find the article in seconds. The point of being a consultant is to make resources accessible to clients and then guide them through how to use them or amend for their purposes. The reason lots of our clients engage with us is to save them the effort of searching themselves.

Thirdly, it’s possible that a prospective client might see my post, think “how helpful, they must know their stuff” and engage with us on something else.

The moral of the story? Let’s take the mystery out of marketing by making it easier for small businesses to do themselves, if they have the time and inclination to do it. If not, they can call HeyStrategy (then I clicked retweet!)

Interested in how useful marketing can replace the hard sell? I highly recommend reading Youtility by Jay Baer.

The post Youtility – the joy of making your content genuinely useful appeared first on HeyStrategy.

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.

1. Don’t mistake ‘Promotion’ for ‘Marketing’

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). http://www.shell-livewire.org/home/business-library/marketing-and-promotion/marketing-planning/marketing-mix-4ps/

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.

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:

2. Don’t underestimate the amount of noise out there

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. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/nov/19/advertising.marketingandpr

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 http://www.creativeguerrillamarketing.com/guerrilla-marketing/50-guerrilla-marketing-tactics-you-should-be-using/. I can’t stress enough how much energy you have to put in to marketing.

3. Your marketing is never “done”

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 & 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.

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.

4. Don’t forget that time has a cost

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 on top 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.

5. Don’t forget to improve conversion rates

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:

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!

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.

6. Don’t choose a promotional channel “because everyone is doing it” and 7. Make sure that you are marketing today (and tomorrow) – not for yesterday

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 worst way 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.

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!

If you think you might be making some (or all!) of these mistakes, we’d love to help you! Contact us to start getting your marketing right.

The post Marketing your business – learn from other people’s mistakes! appeared first on HeyStrategy.

The Orchard at Tesco

With that in mind, I was interested to get an invitation some time ago to take part in Tesco’s new social engagement programme, called ‘the Orchard’ – http://orchard.tesco.com/ – I must admit, I wasn’t really not sold on the name! The programme, on the other hand, looks promising. Basically, once you’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’re invited to take part in more studies.

Will people really bother?

So Tesco are obviously taking social media very seriously, and are willing to invest significantly in trying to create a buzz. I’ve got two problems with it though:

1. It’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’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’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’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’m a bit mercenary, but for me the rewards weren’t sufficient to keep me involved.
2. It feels very forced. My approach is that people should want to share your content or talk about what you’re doing, rather than feeling that they have to. I can see why the concept of ‘gamifying’ social activity might work for companies where the product is fairly dull, but I think that consumers are wise enough to take these effectively ‘bought’ shares with a large pinch of salt. Personally if I’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 – a ‘thanks for sharing’ rather than an ‘incentive to share’.

Any Lessons for Smaller Businesses?

It must be great to be a major corporation with money to chuck at these sorts of things, but most of us don’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’t make further participation so explicitly conditional on social activity – to a degree, the scale at which Tesco has launched actually works against them, and there’s an opportunity for smaller companies to do this smarter and better.

The post Social Engagement appeared first on HeyStrategy.

1. Just do it, already

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’ve been working all day, you’re knackered, and you want a break. If you’re doing your own marketing and you don’t make the time to do it eventually you will be short of clients and wishing you had.

The majority of our clients come through referrals, but I’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.

30 seconds to spare? Log onto Twitter and tell your followers what you’re working on. If you’ve got 5 minutes, phone a sales prospect. If you’ve got 10 minutes, why not write a blog post? If you’ve got a couple of hours, review your business cards / flyers / sales letters / whatever. You get the idea

2. It doesn’t have to be perfect

This is what I’ve really struggled with – you start working on something, get to a point where you’re reasonably happy, but delay finishing it because it’s “not quite right”. It’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.

3. Give yourself a brief

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!

4. Bite the bullet and outsource

If you really can’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 – you can’t bootstrap all the time…

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