The business world is changing! Today customer’s are better informed and much more demanding. The internet has made information readily available to customers and for the first time ever small companies are able to compete with the big boys on very small marketing budgets.

It is therefore imperative that your business is ready to respond and has an up to date and robust marketing strategy. In this week’s tip of the week, Serial Entrepreneur Patrick White introduces you to Module 4 of the Business Growth Course, which addresses these very issues and offers helpful insight.

Find Out More About the Business Growth Course

Session 4: Marketing

A good Marketing strategy is at the heart of a solid growth strategy. In order to increase your revenue and profitability, you first need to understand your customers’ needs, provide a product or service to meets those needs and let your customers know that the solution they are looking for exists!

What you’ll be covering in this session:

• The concepts behind a Marketing-led approach to business and the POISE model of Marketing
• Contents and Structure of a Marketing Plan and how each section is relevant to your business
• Marketing Research—working within the process, different types of Marketing research
• Using Marketing Research tools and techniques
• Applying analytical tools to your Marketing Plan
• Understanding Buyer Behaviour and what makes people decide to buy from you—you’ll be shown how this applies to both B2B and B2C customers
• Classification and segmentation of customers according to type and buyer behaviour
• Setting strategies according to the current stage of the Product Life Cycle and planning for New Product Development and Launch
• Applying the Boston Matrix and Ansoff’s Matrix to your business to identify which products you should be offering to which markets
• Pricing Strategies—you’ll be shown 13 different short-term and long-term strategies for using your price to position your products and services in the marketplace; as well as in the minds of your customers, and to generate sales
• Channel and Distribution Tactics—selling via agents, wholesalers, retailers and other intermediaries
• Communicating your message and promoting your products and services through appropriate media
• Relationship Marketing and Business Development strategies for forging strong business contacts
• Creating your own Marketing Flowchart which illustrates how you will execute your plan

Find Out More About The Business Growth Course

Marketing your business via Social Media and Online Networking has become a popular and cost effective way of growing your business. The platforms available such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook allow you to establish your niche and communicate to them directly. Watching your customers online and following their live feeds and discussions provides you with invaluable insights into their interests and concerns. Something that previously would have cost you thousands to find out is now freely available to you.

However – and this is a big warning to you! – while there are a great deal of people finding new business contracts and profitable relationships online, there are also others that are losing out BECAUSE of online networking. How? Because they haven’t taken the necessary steps to protect their own personal brand and online identity.

When looking to enter into a new business relationship it is quite standard to ‘google’ someone to find out who they are. The results can bring up all sorts of images and information that you would prefer people not to see. When you’ve finished reading this, try Googling yourself and see what comes up.

I’m willing to bet that if you’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or Bebo, your profile came up (it may have been hidden a few pages into the search results). Even if the person viewing your profile isn’t a member or isn’t signed in, they’ll probably have seen your profile picture. Anyone starting to sweat at this point?
Just taking Facebook as an example, your public profile page appears on Google and in many cases displays a selection of your friends. Hmm…even if your profile pic is perfectly presentable, what about the photos of your friends? Would they impress a potential business associate?

Ok, so if you’ve now started to think about what you can do on a practical level to undo any damage to your reputation, here are some things you can do right now. The tips are about profiles on Facebook, but the principles apply to all social networking sites.

•    Change your profile name so that it doesn’t include your full name as it appears on your business webiste – abbreviate your name or use a nickname. Your real friends will know who you are.
•    If you do want prospective clients or customers to find you or you’re using the site for professional networking, seriously think about having TWO profiles, one for friends and one for professional contacts.
•    Check your privacy settings and put them up to the highest level. If your friends have a habit of tagging photos of you, go onto the page where the photo appears and click ‘Remove Tag’. Then go to your Privacy settings and alter the settings relating to who can view your pictures and videos. I recommend you set them at maximum privacy if you can bear to.
•    Look very carefully at what comments and pictures other people have posted on your profile. If they aren’t saying the right things about you or they are likely to reflect badly on you, delete them and make sure that you check regularly to see that the amusing but crude pictures, jokes and YouTube videos people tend to share don’t keep coming back to haunt you!
•    Now go to your Applications. If you’ve added applications that won’t impress people, remove them straight away. Business contacts are rarely interested to know which person from ‘Friends’ you are most like.
•    Now to your Groups. Even if you’ve got your privacy settings up to the max, the instant you join a Group, you’re appearing on the online map. The Groups you join say a lot about you and in many cases mean that your full profile is visible to any other members of that Group. If you in a moment of madness joined the ‘Why I hate my boss’ group or ‘interesting places I’ve had sex at work’, it’s probably time to leave that group.
•    Now to your Friends list. Do you really have 347 friends who you see on a regular basis? You’re probably giving every one of them full access to your profile. Just because you’ve decided that photos of you will only be visible to your friends, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to show them to anyone else. Especially if you’ve accepted a Friends request from a colleague or ex-colleague. If you really don’t want certain people to see what’s in your profile, you can either adjust your Privacy settings to restrict what people can see or consider removing them from your friends list.
•    If you communicate with your friends via the Wall feature, remember that you are having a very public conversation. If you post something like “I was so drunk last night I can’t remember what I did” on a friend’s wall, you have absolutely NO control over who is going to see it. Use the private message boards or old-fashioned e-mail for personal communications.
•    Finally, if all else fails, close your account and start again (although it is easier said than done to get your profile data removed from a social networking site).

Now, before you rush off to update your profiles to make them squeaky clean, if someone is searching for you online, you still need to come across as you. If you’re a fun-loving person who only wants to deal with people and companies who have a sense of humour and have some energy about them, that’s what they are going to be looking for on your profile. If you only include air-brushed professional studio photos as profile pics and have no applications at all on your profile, there’s a danger that you’ll come across as a bit dull or not their kind of person. So there’s a balance. Be yourself, but within reason.

© Copyright Hannah McNamara 2010

There is more to business success than having a great idea.  For some people, their ideas translate instantly into a profitable business and for others, years of hard work and study. Often entrepreneurs who find success quickly are considered lucky, but as Patrick tells in this video there is more to it than just luck, and early success does not dictate ongoing success.

For more information on the Business Growth Course and upcoming start dates, click here.

How to get more business from your small business website.

Hannah McNamara, SME Academy Director, talks about how to convert hits and website traffic into paying clients and customers. She explains why offering special reports, ebooks, white papers and mp3 downloads can help with data capture and building an email marketing mailing list. She also discusses how to put a landing page together and get more people to opt in to your database so you can send them your newsletter, ezine or articles.

www.GetMoreClientsMakeMoreMoney.co.uk

Hannah McNamara from SME Academy (http://www.smeacademy.co.uk) explains how to take the time and effort out of small business marketing by automating and systemising marketing activities. This includes the use of autoresponders, YouTube and other techniques.

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Transcript

Most people I speak to admit that they can have a fairly inconsistent approach to marketing. It gets done when they have time or when sales are down and this creates a feast or famine situation – you’re either doing well or you’re scratching around for business.

So what can you do if you’re a small business without a dedicated Marketing team?

Well, the answer is to systemise your marketing and even your sales process. This isn’t as complicated as you might think. I’m guessing that you have certain sales and marketing activities which aren’t really unique. For example someone visits your website and is interested in getting more information so they send an email to the address on your ‘contact us’ page. Either you or one of your staff has to reply to the email attaching a brochure and then remember to follow up with them to find out whether they are likely to buy from you. If they do decide to buy then you’ll have to process the sale and if they don’t decide to buy on this occasion someone has to remember to contact them again at a later date.

This could all be automated.

The bottom line is that if you do any marketing activity more than once you can probably automate or part-automate it.

Many marketing software packages enable you to do any of the following:

• Capture people’s contact details and add them to your opt-in database
• Automatically send an email to them with the information that they have requested
• Follow up with them to see whether they have any questions
• Email them with your latest offers
• Send out a sequence of emails at set intervals telling them more about what you offer
• Suggest and up-sell additional items when customers are using your shopping cart
• Automatically unsubscribe and subscribe people
• Schedule seasonal Marketing messages weeks or months in advance
• And many, many more

We use a package called 1shoppingcart to automate our own marketing activities and it’s so much more cost effective than trying to do all of these activities manually. It gives us more time to spend with our clients.

If yours is a people-focused business and your customers and clients like to see who they’re dealing with, you could record a video to share your sales presentations or to share tips with them. YouTube is filled with informercials and demonstrations from lots and lots of businesses.

Automating your marketing can take some time planning, but it really is worth it if you can put in the time to do it now.

For more video tips and articles go to: www.smeacademy.co.uk

[END TRANSCRIPTION – 00:02:33]

Dr Patrick White from SME Academy explains how a little-known Japanese fishing technique can be applied to your business in a recession to improve results.

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We publish tips like this on a regular basis, so make sure you’re on our mailing list and you’ll be told when we add new video tips and articles to the site. You are automatically added to our mailing list when you download a copy of our FREE e-book ‘10 Ways to Sabotage Your Own Business: Are you making these mistakes?’ Claim your copy now here.

Transcript

Hello. Today I would like to talk about:

‘Putting A Shark In Your Business’

You might think this is a really odd topic but I’m relating it to the recession that we are currently having; because one of the things I have learned, being old enough and having been through a few recessions is that it gives you an opportunity to really examine what is going on in your business and make some steps that will improve your business ready for the future.

I’d like to tell you a story that relates to this which I read not that long ago and it’s to do with a Japanese fishing fleet.

The Japanese, over recent times, had fished out all the fish around their own islands and therefore had to send their fleet much further afield to get the fish. Obviously they couldn’t keep the fish alive to get back to the market unless they did something about it.

So initially what they did was they put big freezers on their ships and froze the fish and then took it back to Japan.

However this presented a problem because the Japanese consumer noted that the fish did not taste as fresh as they were used to eating. So what were they to do about this?

So they took their fleet, took all the freezers off and replaced them with big tanks. When they caught the fish they would put the fish in the tanks, fin-to-fin, and let them wriggle around and try and keep them alive so when they got back to Japan they would have the fresh taste.

However after a while the fish stopped wriggling and would just go into a sort of state of frigidity. So when they got back to Japan the same problem happened; the local consumers in Japan said the fish still tasted like it wasn’t fresh. It still tasted like it had been frozen under the previous way of doing things.

So then someone came up with a bright idea of: “Why don’t we put a small shark in each tank? And the shark will swim around; he might eat a few fish but because the shark’s there the fish keep wriggling around.”

And when they got back to Japan it tasted still like fresh fish. So you’ve got to treat the recession like someone has put a shark in your business. And let it wriggle around until you find out ways to do things better and get the results you want.

Thank you. For more video tips and articles go to: www.smeacademy.co.uk

[END TRANSCRIPTION – 00:02:37]

Saturday 25th April 2009 | Free Event

SME Academy’s Hannah McNamara will be one of the presenters at Business Link London’s Business Start-Up Guide event on Saturday 25th April.

Event Details

Unfulfilled in your current job or facing job insecurity?

Maybe it’s time to take control of your own destiny and start your own business.

This inspirational one day workshop will help you to explore the potential of working for yourself. Over the course of the day you will develop an understanding of the key ingredients of starting a successful business and receive guidance to help you consider:

• If you have what it takes to run your own business
• How to develop a business idea
• If you can you make money
• What to put in a business plan
• How to promote and sell your business products or service
• Where to go for further guidance and information

In addition you will be offered the opportunity to talk your idea through with one of Business Link London’s experienced business advisers.

Course Fee: FREE by you must register

Read more about this event and register

Dr Patrick White from SME Academy explains how the principle behind providing your customers with fresh milk and boost business and differentiate you from your competitors.

Transcript:

Today I’d like to talk about the critical question – you may wonder what the question is. Well it’s quite simple; it is:

Why should customers deal with us?

You might have heard this term ‘Customer Value Proposition’ or ‘Unique Selling Point’ but it is very important in today’s world because we need to differentiate ourselves from our competitors because most products are now commoditised and most services are similar.

So we’ve got to try and make ourselves different and appear different to what our competitors are doing. How can we do this, you might ask. Well, it’s quite difficult but I’d like to talk about a little story which might illustrate the point.

When I first went into business I bought a hotel and the hotel was in a tourist town where there were lots of other hotels.

Having bought the business I suddenly discovered that all the hotels were charging about the same price, which is a problem in itself because the worst place you can be is in the middle because you’re neither at one end of the price spectrum or the other.

However, I thought: “How can I differentiate myself from the other hotels?”

The first thing I discovered was that in hotel directories the most expensive hotels are always listed first. You know the thing: 5 Star, 4 Star, 3 Star, 2 Star, ‘Bring your own tent’ type hotels.

So I figured that if I could make myself the most expensive I would be at the front end of the directory and more people would see me. This, you would think, is quite simple.

However, why would people come to me just because I’m the most expensive? I had to find other ways to differentiate myself from the other hotels in the town and so justify the premium I was charging over them.

Another thing I noticed was in most hotels when you book in they provide you with coffee and tea and they give you those little pottles of milk – you know, the UHT type ones?

Well my hotel was in Australia where milk was quite readily available and quite cheap and most Australians and other visitors that come to Australia do not actually like UHT milk.

So one of the things I hit on was that I would give every customer that stayed in my hotel fresh milk. So when you checked in we pulled out a jug of fresh milk. But that in itself was not enough; we had to add other things.

Another thing I noticed when I was booking into hotels was that people would give you your key, say: “Here’s your key; go to the third floor and it’s the second room on the right.”

And I would be there with my wife and children and be struggling with bags and everything trying to get up there. So one of the other things we did, once we had checked people in and poured the milk jug, we then took the people key in hand to their room helping them with their luggage and their children.

Another benefit of doing this was I could get into the room and check that the quality of the room was fine; that the cleaners hadn’t left anything there, that everything was in ship-shape.

So I would make a display of putting the milk in the fridge, checking the room, helping them settle in and then go back down to the reception.

What happened after this was that we got a reputation amongst a lot of people: “You should stay at this hotel because they actually give you fresh milk.”

So it was a very small thing. It cost me 40 cents to give fresh milk and got me a $20 premium on the price of the room. I had differentiated myself from the rest and therefore people started coming to me and often it was because of word-of-mouth.

What you’ve got to ask yourself in your business is:

“What can I do to differentiate myself from my competitors?”

- And then answer the question:

“Why would people come to me?”

Just saying: “We give good service, go the extra mile.” – Etc, etc doesn’t cut it because everybody does the same thing. Look into your business and find out what you can do uniquely that differentiates you from your competitor and then work on that strength and try and build more business.

Thank you.

For more video tips and articles go to: www.smeacademy.co.uk

[END TRANSCRIPTION – 00:04:34]

On Thursday 13th November 2008, Patrick White will be running his popular one-day course ‘Moving your business to the next level’.

This course is perfect for any business owner or company director who is planning the next stage of the development of the business. If you are in the midst of strategic business planning, a day with Patrick on this course will be invaluable.

It’s a great introduction to SME Academy’s Business Growth Programme.

Because the one-day course is hosted by Business Link, it is fully-funded for SMEs. To attend the course through SME Academy would normally cost £250+VAT.

Register for the ‘Moving Your Business to the Next Level’ now.

Seminar: 6.30pm Thursday 13th March 2008

Over the past few weeks, the media seems to be promoting a ‘doom and gloom’ message for UK businesses. The focus has mainly been on the large well-known brands, but what does the future hold for the directors and owners of small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs)?

On Thursday 13th March 2008, serial entrepreneur Patrick White will be delivering a seminar entitled ‘How to Recession-Proof Your Business’ at the Hotel Russell, in Russell Square, London.

This informative and very practical seminar takes delegates through the crucial factors when preparing your business for tough times ahead.

Find out more