Module 4: Marketing

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

Is Your Online Brand Good For Business?

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

Small Business Coach or Mentor?

Do I need a small business coach, a mentor or a life coach?

SME Academy in London offers all three services which are explained below.

The terms small business coach or business mentor are often used interchangeably within the business world, but what do people really mean when they talk about small business coaching or business mentoring? And how are they different from executive coaching or life coaching?
…Read More

[Video Tip] 7 ways to improve sales without really trying

Hannah McNamara from SME Academy explains 7 ways to improve sales in your business. Includes various sales techniques and marketing methods suitable for small, medium and large businesses.
…Read More

Why Productize?

“You have to productize”

That’s the phrase used by most internet marketing gurus when it comes to creating add*itional income for your coaching practice. I’ve yet to meet a coach who doesn’t agree that having additional products to sell would be beneficial to their practice – even if they haven’t got a plan for doing it.

After all, it is common practice for service businesses to offer an up-sell in addition to the services provided. For example:

In the consumer market:

• Hairdressing salons encourage us to buy their preferred brand of hair products
• Dentists recommend the toothbrushes and mouthwashes in stock at reception
• Gyms promote their own-branded backpacks, water bottles and towels

In the business market:

• IT consultancies offer support contacts so that they are on-call to help you with any queries or issues
• Website designers will often include a hosting package with your site so they have had a residual income after the initial work is done
• Sales trainers supply books, manuals and CDs to help their delegates continue to learn by referring back to their materials again and again after the course

Given that almost every other type of service business knows about the need to ‘productize’ why do so few coaches do it? I think it’s because coaching is, to a certain extent, reactive. In most of the service businesses listed above, the service provider is doing something for the customer that they can’t do themselves – cutting their hair, filling their teeth, designing a website or training their staff. With coaching we believe that the coachee is the one doing the work, coming up with the ideas and ultimately generating the results. All true.

What does this mean for creating products for your coaching practice?

While we usually do react to the topics our clients bring to sessions and go with the flow of conversation rather than guiding them down a particular path, there are certain things that you go through with more than one client. You might have developed your own coaching tools, exercises and homework for them to complete. You might find yourself using particular stories and metaphors repeatedly. You might have written articles offering tips or suggestions on how to set goals, uncover values and limiting beliefs or how to come up with positive affirmations.

Rather than only using these in one-to-one sessions, how about putting them together into a product for your clients? Your clients pay for this information already, so there is a pretty good chance that people will be willing to pay for the same information delivered in a different form – as a product.

What could You turn into a product right now?

About the Author:
Hannah McNamara is Chartered Marketer, popular speaker, book author and qualified Coach with over 15 years experience in Sales & Marketing. She now runs workshops, seminars and programmes showing owners and directors of established businesses exactly how to find hidden opportunities and grow their organisation. Hannah is a director of SME Academy.

If you liked this article, you’ll love the free e-book ‘10 Ways to Sabotage Your Own Business: Are you making these mistakes?’ You can download it now from ebook.smeacademy.co.uk