I really enjoyed doing this interview, and I don’t think it’s hard to see why. Dave is a really fun guy to shoot the breeze with, and has an incredible talent for simultaneously teasing out and then neatly crystallizing useful insights from the semi-coherent ramblings of…well, me. Difficult work, to be sure.

In this interview, there are tips, shared experiences, and a good few laughs too, so I think you’ll enjoy it. If not, blame the lying headline…

(PS I start around 2:05)

Walk with me here. Let’s experiment by substituting the word “Telephone” for “Social Media” in a pretty common phrase that’s probably tossed around by CMO’s these days:

“Guys, we need to put together a [Telephone] strategy ASAP. [Telephones] are the latest growing trend among consumers, so we need to create a cohesive brand presence on the latest [Telephone] platforms, and use [Telephones] to drive customer acquisition.”

A tad myopic, no? But there’s not much that makes telephones so radically different from social media – after all, both technologies enable you to reach out and instantly connect with another human being. But if you look at how telephones are used in marketing, you’ll see that campaigns merely incorporate phone numbers, but aren’t built entirely around them, so why are so many focused on trying to do it with social media? It’d be a brave creative director who unveils the new campaign slogan “Now you can reach us by phone!” to their client these days; for many consumers, this type of message is met with a resounding “So what?”, regardless of the technology in question – unless you’re Big Bear Mountain Resorts, that is…

“I’m tooting right now…” – Big Bear Mountain Resorts radio spot

The upshot

Social media for its own sake is missing the point. The best campaigns are always the ones that tell a compelling story, or resonate with the trials, tribulations and joys of your customers, regardless of technology. The future of marketing belongs to the storytellers, and always will.

Yes, I said babies

My wife is an OB-GYN, and encounters a large number of women who, while being admitted to the hospital, are dead-set on having all-natural births. Absolutely no caesarian sections or epidurals for me, thankyouverymuch doctor. The reasons are varied, but mostly valid – they don’t want the scar, they read something about it breaking the mother-child bond, etc.

Now the unfortunate reality is that a large portion of these women experience some kind of complication that is usually easily remedied with a c-section, whether it be for the mother’s health, the baby’s health, or (usually) both. Guess how many of those women are upset about the c-section when they joyously embrace their baby for the first time? (hint, it’s somewhere between 0 and ‘not many at all’). When it comes down to it, going with an all-natural birth was a request that the doctor overrided in the patient’s best interest – with the outcome being far more satisfactory to all parties involved. Despite ignoring what it said on the spec sheet, the doctor was able to deliver (literally) the goods.

This isn’t to say that vendors don’t have their own role. With some tasks, you can skip the ponderous hand-wringing, and go straight to execution – oftentimes benefiting you with lower cost and greater speed – in other words, it’s ‘good enough‘. The master himself, Jerry Seinfeld explains it best: “Fine, just get where it says on the ticket”.

Identifying partners versus vendors

There are several telltale signs that can help you determine which you’re talking to.

That last one’s a doozy for many of us – in order to get a partner to fulfill their potential, you have to let go, and open your mind to different approaches from what you’d normally have happen.

The Formula

All of this can be boiled down into a simple logic process for your decision. I warn you now – there may be code (eep!):

If (Speed + Low Cost) > Innovation {
Go with a vendor
} otherwise {
Go with a partner
}

What do you guys think – are there other factors that come into play when choosing who to ask for help with a task? Shout, shout, let it all out in the comments!

The whole phenomenon sounds great on the surface, but it can present a conundrum for a lot of small business owners. It is, let’s face it, a question of quantity vs. quality – is it better to sell your product (into which you pour your blood sweat, and yes, tears) briefly for 75% off in the hopes of attracting a few new customers that might pay 100%? Or should one stick to organically growing an authentic customer base, albeit at a slower rate? Questions of strategery, indeed.

Enter the Groupon Decision Tree

The answer, as in many cases in life, is not cut and dried, but fear not, for I’ve distilled the choices down for you, using my patented Group-Buy-O-Matic diagram (also known as a friggin’ decision tree for Groupon, LivingSocial, and all the other group-buying services out there).

Download the Groupon Decision Tree here (PDF)

What do you think? Anything in the decision tree that’s missing? Or do you guys think Groupon is a win-win across all fronts? I’m interested to hear your stories and anecdotes in the comments!

Just Kidding

"Do I have something on my face?"

Yes, I’m talking out of my butt (again).

The number of ways you can enagage people with your product before it’s available are legion – as are the practitioners of such ‘buzz’ marketing methods. The videogame industry has a lot of practice with this, what with the long production times, multi-million dollar budgets and high expectations of its customers. A huge amount of focus and pressure is put on their preorders and Day 1 sales. How else could sites like Gametrailers, or Gamevideos keep their visitors during the industry’s traditional summer doldrums? Then, there’s a certain fruit company that’s reknowned for inspiring internet-breaking volumes of chatter surrounding its new products (which are usually shrouded in airtight secrecy)…

Tell a story that keeps unfolding

People love a good story – it’s in our nature. Events like the rescue of 33 trapped miners in Chile keep people riveted to the headlines, primarily because of the background, exposition, and characters involved. Similarly, the thing that keeps people interested in a product is the story behind it. Every product has one, and until recently, much of the work that went into bringing a new offering to market was difficult disseminate effectively, and in a manner that was inclusive to the customer. Nowadays, the tools exist to easily share such information, but what kinds of content and methods of sharing get people talking about products they can’t even own or interact with yet?

• Make some material exclusive – Make sure to collect some info from your audience for some or all updates about your phantom product, whether that’s an email address, a ‘Like’ on your official Facebook page, a follow on your Twitter profile, etc. By building this audience, you make them feel like they’re “in the know” before everyone else.
• Give them a stake in the outcome – This can take multiple forms, from the risky-but-sometimes-rewarding crowdsourcing method of seeking customer input on the actual product (see Mountain Dew’s hugely user-driven Dewmocracy campaign), to simple polls about customer preferences, to limited-time live Q&A sessions, and so on. Showing people that they can have a tangible effect on the end of the story allows them to emotionally invest in a successful launch.
• Pace yourself – Make sure that whenever you begin your buzz-building efforts, you have enough content to go the distance until launch-day. Although it may be tempting to publish your prototype photos and chief engineer interview, and press release all at once, restrain yourself, child! You need a slow, steady burn to get and maintain people’s attention. Otherwise you end up with a short-lived community that peters out quickly.
• Be unpolished – I talk about this all the time, I know, but I repeat: it doesn’t have to be perfect to be interesting. Flipcam videos, cellphone camera pics, snippets of interesting conversations, or quick interviews with key people – all of these serve to draw back the corporate velvet curtain and introduce your customers to the people, hours and passion that go into creating the products they love.


Treat your influencers well, and they'll do (a lot of) your job for you.

• Pay attention to the influencers – Single out those engaged customers who actively comment on and share your updates for special treatment, to make them the envy of the rest. This can be anything from personal responses, to giveaways, or invitations to a VIP tour of your offices, a one-on-one interview for their blog, etc. Give them special perks in the view of everyone else, and you’ll quickly see an uptick in the activity of your audience. Read the case study on the success of the movie Paranormal Activity‘s social media marketing campaign to see what I mean.
• Have a clear timeline – If the bottom line is to keep the product launch date in mind, you should make it clear what that day is – but don’t overemphasize it. People don’t need minute-to-minute updates.
• Go off-topic – You’re human too. Just because you’re representing a product, doesn’t mean you may only communicate about topics related to it, and it alone. Take a look at Zappos’ social media activities (or should I say hijinks) – sometimes, you could be mistaken for thinking they just hooked up a webcam to Crazyworld. Yet people love it, because this makes them human, with human interests, and human ADD. Have fun with it, and people will have fun with you.
• Remember the payoff - Don’t post an update if you have nothing to say. A story that goes nowhere loses people’s interest fast – especially if you cry wolf about a supposed update that doesn’t provide any new information.

How do you guys go about building anticipation for your upcoming products? Leave me something smart in the comments!

Gap proudly unveils its new logo, calling it “a more contemporary, modern expression.”.

Tuesday October 5th – Sunday October 11th

The Internet tells the Gap that it sucks, using such delicate and tactful methods as Make Your Own Gap Logo, and a @BPGlobalPR-esque effort on Twitter.

Monday October 12th

Gap cries ‘uncle’.

To me, this whole incident proved that the public can quickly hijack a majority share of your brand – if you let them. This is far more than a price hike, or a change in the product lineup. By folding so quickly on an issue as critical to the company’s future as their brand, it tells me that they a) never truly believed in the rebranding effort in the first place (so why do it?), and b) roll over easily to public opinion.

Whether or not the logo was garbage (it was), the bigger issue here is the implication that Gap can be held hostage by public criticism. What happens when they decide to get rid of chinos? Or roll out Ikea-style cafeterias? Or any one of a billion other possible initiatives that will spur some people to stand up and proclaim “That’s not the Gap!”?

So, what are the lessons?

• Listen to what your customers say, of course, but also remember that people usually hate change – until they love it. Just ask Steve Jobs about the backlash to his little-known flop, the iPad (heard of it?)
• Focus groups are easier than ever to perform today, and can save you one hell of a PR migraine
• Think very carefully before you backtrack – you cede so much control to your customers when you do. Consider the recent trials and tribulations of Digg, and its user uprising against the version 4 redesign. How long do you think it’ll be before they dare roll out version 5? How much do you want to bet there’ll even be a version 5?

What do you guys think, should Gap have stuck it out longer, or were they right to cave? My brain is an open receptacle for your knowledge – fill it!

UPDATE

It appears that Starbucks had the stones to continue with its own rebranding despite Gap’s public flogging – customer backlash be damned. I wish them luck, although on the face of it, this redesign is far less head-scratchingly egregious.

Oh, you want some more?

“The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time.” ~ Henry Ford

“Advertising is totally unnecessary. Unless you hope to make money.” ~ Jef I. Richards

Ok, that’s enough for now. So here you have it – 9 legit reasons why, if anything, you should be going like gangbusters on your marketing efforts:

1. Your competition probably isn’t – Meaning that now is the time to gain market share
2. You must continue to be visible - Or your sales will decline accordingly
3. People are looking for value – Right now, they’re less loyal to “the brand they’ve always bought” than ever before – which represents an opening for spunky young challengers like yourself to get them to try something new
4. It’s good for the economy – C’mon, redistribute the wealth to people who’ll help your business grow, instead of just survive
5. It’s good for our morale – Seriously, the less doom and gloom, and the more success stories we get to hear about, the better
6. Location-based marketing is taking off – There’s a new goldrush kicking off to establish a presence in these areas – soon to be followed by the mobile payments sector
7. It’s cheaper now than ever before – Major corporations used to be the only ones around who could afford the type of mass-scale reach and activation potential that is now available to every yokel with a webcam and a Twitter account. Scale is now a commodity, and an incredibly useful one, that’s available to all, so use it!
8. No, seriously, it’s cheaper now than ever before – Most ad agencies are looking to add to their client rosters to replace revenue that’s disappeared thanks to aforementioned budget cuts, so it may be worth scheduling a few meetings – they might not be as out-of-reach of your budget as you think, and this could be the start of a beautiful relationship.
9. Good content has a long shelf life - Investing in good marketing content that attracts and engages readers/viewers/listeners will pay you back with ongoing traffic long after you’ve created it.
10. Um, would a $30bn loan change your mind? - It’s good for the housing market, so why not small biz? The president just signed a bill to offer $30 billion in Small Business Administration and community bank loans. So what’s stopping you from taking out a small loan to fund some marketing methods with proven ROI?

Oh, ok, just one more quote:

“The thing I hate most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.” ~ Banksy

What do you think? Are there any other good reasons for maintaining or increasing your visibility in an economic downturn?

Writing a great marketing plan: 7 essential elements

As always, leave your thoughts in the comments below. Or, if you’ve had a lightbulb moment, email me with a 90 Sec Deck suggestion!

Heresy alert: I’ve been struggling with a dark secret recently – you see, I realized that I really dislike SEO. To me it’s like health insurance – I hate dealing with it, I intensely dislike paying for it, and its benefits are difficult to for most people to understand. But, like health insurance, I have a healthy respect for it because it’s there when you need it.

I’m not alone in this view – Jason Calacanis and Scott Stratten among others have been shouting this loudly from the rooftops for a while – but it’s only recently that these feelings have swirled inside me, because SEO is now on the lips of small business owners, as they struggle to get to grips with it, or hire someone who can do it for them. So here’s my take-it-or-leave-it case for/against SEO.

Why I hate SEO

• It’s technically cheating, or at the very least gaming the system – rather than the truly best, most thoughtful, authentic content rising to the top of the rankings, we have the most-linked, most-strategically-keyworded. It’s like saying that the most beautiful woman in the world is Miss Universe – engineered, and trained from an early age to jump through the hoops required to wear the crown – when we all know that it’s really a tie between Tina Fey and Nigella Lawson: witty, gorgeous, genuine and engaging beyond measure (Tina, Nigella, if you’re reading this, call me ).

• Who likes doing it, aside from SEO consultants? Be honest…

• The Semantic Web is coming, and with it, the importance of meaning, context and intent. As this video tutorial on the Semantic Web neatly explains, computers today merely mimic information like parrots, but they don’t have the ability to understand that information, or interpret it without our help. Once they reach that level of awareness, however, their search accuracy will become drastically refined, and the importance of SEO will plummet.

• To me, it’s a lot like marketing-by-numbers; I see very little beauty, emotion or creativity in it, because you’re taking a piece of information that’s initially crafted for people, and making it more attractive for a computer algorithm. I’ve never heard of a customer raving about a brand’s awesome SEO, nor heard of them being motivated to buy on the strength of where the page placed in the search rankings. At the end of the day, SEO makes you easier to find, but will never close the deal.

• I love Google, but SEO in the western hemisphere is basically a cottage industry that’s grown around one company and is monumentally affected by its every whim. Facebook catches a lot of flak from marketers for its constant changing of the rulebook, but they at least publicize those changes ahead of time! Because of the necessity for Google to keep its algorithm a secret, SEO-ers are constantly testing to figure out what’s changed, and what the intent is. Not. Healthy. If marketing on Facebook is building your house on rented land, investing tons of cash in SEO seems like building an amusement park on it, and hoping to the heavens that the highway doesn’t get diverted.

Why I respect SEO

• I understand SEO’s critical importance in any kind of meaningful content strategy, and its effectiveness is proven to attract traffic when done well. You want to make sure that you’re attracting the right kind of visitors with your content, so optimizing it to be attractive to those users makes sense (but it still sucks, there, I said it).

• It prequalifies your traffic before they arrive at your site – you know they’re looking for whatever it is you’ve keyworded into your content

• Until recently, SEO was a fairly level playing field – budget didn’t matter, only arcane knowledge of search engine algorithms, and the discipline to see the optimization process through

• Content has a much longer lifespan than virtually any outbound marketing vehicle, meaning it’s a long-term investment that can pay off down the road. Even if your content doesn’t rank right now, you never know what algorithm changes could turn you into an overnight page 1 superstar (maybe)

• The ingenuity involved & the lengths people will go to to one-up each other are truly astounding – check out Google’s Webspam engineer Matt Cutts as he dissects one of the more nefarious methods that unethical (but ingenious) SEO folks will use to get their content to the hallowed front page.

• Finally, when you think about it, SEO is nothing that we don’t already do in other facets of our daily lives – we name-drop to make people think we’re more important than we really are, we put keywords into our resumes when job-hunting, so that recruiters will pay attention to us, and we talk about the charming atmosphere and spacious rooms when trying to sell our houses. These are all ways that we use keywords outside of the internet, so I guess the existence of SEO shouldn’t be any surprise – the only difference is that Google’s attention – not other people’s – is what matters most.

What do you think – do you like SEO? Hate it? Why? Sound off in the comments below!

Even as someone who lives and breathes marketing, instead of oxygen like most human organisms, I find the somewhat-black art of SEO a little intimidating. So I thought I’d provide some simple SEO tips that I’ve personally used, and will help you optimize your content over 95% of the other stuff out there.

The trick is focusing on the ‘O’ part – Optimization. SEO isn’t about fixing anything you’re doing wrong; it’s about making your great content even better, so it more likely to be found by customers searching for it. imagine your content as a gorgeous debutante about to be introduced to society at the ball. SEO is the sparkly tiara that attracts the attention of all those handsome search engine suitors. There’s a working metaphor in there somewhere, I swear.

Let’s skip the ado, and get on with it – what are the basic SEO tricks that any small businesss can easily implement without messing around with any godforsaken code?

Write great content

The funny thing about SEO is that it’s sort of, well… cheating – basically, you’re gaming Google’s and other search engines’ scoring methods to have your content appear higher in the results listings. The catch is that the engines are constantly adjusting their algorithm, and without constant testing and reverse-engineering, you can’t be guaranteed to hold a particular spot.

So what’s the point? Well, Google and others have openly stated that they’re always searching for good content, and as the engines get smarter, SEO will become less important compared to the overall quality. Translation: stuffing your posts full of keywords is no substitute for having something meaningful to say. A great example of this trend is the recent launch of Gmail’s Priority Inbox feature, that measures the amount you engage with messages from a certain sender, in order to decide whether it’s important – expect that technology to expand to general search if it catches on. Remember, people may arrive at your site thanks to SEO, but they’ll stay longer and link to the good stuff if you provide it.

Pick smart keywords

Uh...I didn't mean the headline literally. (pic credit: Carversation.com)

Keywords are the phrases for which you want your content to be found. By choosing wisely, you can pre-qualify your visitors to make sure they’re interested in what you have to offer before they arrive. If you’re an italian restaurant, it just makes sense to have the words “Italian Restaurant” sprinkled throughout your website, capice?

Others may be using the same keywords as you, however, and therefore compete with your website for customers’ attention. This is where carefully choosing your keywords comes in. Consider exactly what words customers are using to find you. Instead of “Italian Restaurant”, they may be looking for “Pizzeria”, or “best Mussels Fra Diavolo”, or “moist, creamy Tiramisu” (I should stop right there – *drool*).

Focusing on these keywords in addition to those your competitors use may give you a nudge ahead of them. One of the best ways to figure out which words to optimize for is to use an analytics package (I’m partial to Google Analytics, myself) and track which keywords customers are already using to find you. You can then either concentrate on sprinkling the best-performing keywords throughout your site, or throw them into a tool like Google’s Insights for Search to see what related keywords could drive extra traffic for you. Once you have your keywords, work them into your content – especially…

Your headlines – pay attention to them

Search engines take special note of the headlines on each page, as they should be a strong indicator of the type of information they contain – this means you should have your chosen keywords included in there. Subheads are also important, since they denote what a particular paragraph or section may pertain to.

Make connections with reciprocal links

Reciprocity can be a beautiful thing - and so can monkeys scratching each other.

Linking to relevant information helps to establish you as a trusted and relevant resource of information on whatever subject you’re covering, so by all means link to your source material – even better: if you actually hyperlink your chosen keywords, this shows the search engines that your site not only contains relevant information, but can act as a funnel to even more.

The same goes for linking back to your website from your various social media outposts as well – all of these reciprocal links help build your website as a legitimate online presence, and trusted authority in the eyes of Google, which will only help push you up the rankings.

Give sight to the blind

Search engines are like moles, in that they’re blind, they live in the dark, and occasionally win millions of dollars on reality TV shows aaand that’s about it. Images and other types of media are a particular blind spot, meaning that they cannot process the actual content of these elements, and instead rely on the context within which they’re used in order to deduce what’s inside them. To help them out, you should make sure to include your keywords within the title/alt attributes of your images – the little yellow box of text that appears when you hover over an image – and optionally in the actual filename of the image, too.

Most website content management systems (CMS’s) such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc., give you the ability to add in these attributes when inserting an image, so take advantage of it. If you’re not using a CMS, well it’s only a tiny bit of code to add titles and alt-attributes – God won’t forsake you that much.

There must be tons of other things that non-coders can do to improve their SEO – tell me what I missed in the comments, dammit!

Overall, this new feature speaks to a broader emerging trend that focuses less on following the technical rules of email deliverability best practices (although they’re still important), and on the nebulous concept of subscriber engagement, which is far more difficult to predict prior to sending out your campaign.

1) Segment your list by email domain

Unless you were incorporating certain design features in your email that weren’t widely supported, you probably didn’t need to care too much about which email services your subscribers use until now, (unless it was Lotus Notes – shudder). In the near term, however, it’ll be important for you to figure out what proportion of your subscriber list is affected by the introduction of the Priority Inbox – Gmail’s a major email provider, but by no means the only game in town, so it’s a good first step to get a handle on how many subscribers have access to this kind of behavioral filtering.

2) Go to plan B for non-responders

Once you’ve separated out your Gmail users, sort them into 2 groups – Responsive and Unresponsive; the threshold you set that determines which bucket they should go into will depend on your lists’ past performance. Those responsive subscribers should be ok to continue communicating with via email – their past history of responding to your messages means your campaigns have a decent chance of being prioritized, or of the user themselves electing to prioritize you as a sender.

You’ll need a plan B for the Unresponder group, since unless you  can persuade them to change their behavior with your email, it’ll now be a waste of time trying to reach them this way. Consider running an incentive campaign to attempt to reenergize them about your emails, or simply use a tool like Flowtown, or MailChimp’s socialPRO features to find a viable alternative channel with which to interact with them.

Now might also be the time to conduct a full poll of your mailing list, to figure out how your subscribers – Gmail and non-Gmail users alike – prefer to remain engaged with you. You may actually find that a significant number opt to shift their interactions with you over to social media platforms instead – pruning your email list (and therefore bringing down the cost), and boosting the activity of your social media audiences.

3) Start eliciting genuine responses

Heresy alert: opens and clicks are not the be-all and end-all of email engagement. Email was always intended to be a conversational medium, but how many marketers out there do you see sending emails from addresses like “noreply@acme.com”, or “ignore_this_address@notinterestedinhearingfromyou.com”? In a time when brands are rushing to show how well they’re listening, I find these little signs to be deeply ironic. Gmail’s Priority Inbox places emphasis on senders who’ve engaged with the subscriber in a genuine conversation – meaning that whatever message the subscriber received was compelling enough to get them to actually reply with a message of their own.

Al Iverson over at the excellent ExactTarget blog took the words right out of my mouth on this one:

Consider allowing subscribers to reply to your email messages. Active email interaction — two-way email exchanges — are likely to help boost your chances at receiving priority treatment.

What a novel concept! After all, it’s supposed to be your company email address, right? Such solicited replies could take the form of anything – collect competition entries, responses to a short questionnaire, ask for testimonials from customers, etc. Basically, anything to get your subscribers to click that ‘Reply’ button will pay huge dividends when it comes time to send your next campaign.

4) Create a Gmail-only call to action

Sometimes, all you need to do is ask. Show your subscribers that you’re paying attention by including a small note asking them to prioritize your message – the message functions in much the same way that you already probably ask them to add you to their address book – here’s my take:

“Hey, we noticed you’re using Gmail – if you want to make sure you continue getting our emails, simply click the “+” sign above this message to tell Google our messages are important to you!”

5) Realize that others will follow suit (if they haven’t already)

This great post on MailChimp’s blog is a nice reminder that although today’s email technology is pretty mature, there are still big changes happening to the landscape – so consider Gmail’s Priority Inbox a practice run for a larger shift by all the major email providers towards filtration by engagement, rather than an arbitrary checklist of features that might mean your email isn’t spam.

That’s my take – what other to-do’s do you guys see as a result of the new Priority Inbox? Let me know in the comments.

The signs are subtle, but they are many – the most obvious example is the coveted Foursquare Mayorship that is beginning to take on real-world value. PR agencies routinely reach out to the most influential bloggers on topics related to their clients’ products, offering them free trials and exclusive site visits in exchange for posts that help drive buzz. BzzAgent, a Word of Mouth and social media marketing agency, tracks its volunteers’ success in stimulating real-world conversations about its clients’ brands, rewarding its more influential “Agents” with valuable perks and schwag. Fast Company has even launched The Influence Project, to find the most influential person online, and like the top 3 in a season of American Idol, expect those people to be sought after for lucrative deals, once outed.

We’re entering an age of inequality, where marketers will target their more influential customers with the hopes of leveraging that social influence into sales. So how can small businesses begin harnessing that influential group of top customers? A few ideas:

First, find your influencers

If you don’t have an official referral program, create one, and make sure it doesn’t just measure the number of sales generated, but also who is referring those sales. Over time, you’ll see which of your customers are actively sending business your way. Jay Baer of Convince & Convert has an excellent article on finding your influential customers.

Socialize the purchase process

No, that doesn’t mean letting the government do all the spending – it means, give your more socially-inclined customers an outlet to publicize their purchases with you. For example, Levi’s online Friends Store lets customers ‘Like’ individual products in Facebook, which publicizes product preferences to their friends. Your influencers are influential partly because they take advantage of any opportunities to share things they like and learn, so make sure you’re providing them that outlet whenever you can.

Play games with your customers

Encouraging healthy competition between friends and peers for rewards and recognition can tip the balance when it comes to driving incremental purchases, and it’ll also help you ferret out who among your customers is passionately engaged and bringing their friends along for the ride. The science of games is inextricably tied to this type of consumer behavior, as Jesse Schell explains in his mind-blowing presentation “When Games Invade Real Life” (you can skip to around the 9:30 mark to hear him talk about how the Facebook game Mafia Wars built a $100 mil business out of stirring up competition between friends, but I highly recommend watching all of it). Virgin America is harnessing the influence trend by offering customers with proven influence (as measured by Klout, a social influence analytics tool) on Twitter free flights

Stop obsessing over the ROI of your social media engagement

You need to realize that your top influencers may not be your top spenders. Remember that your influencers are an accelerant to your marketing efforts, not a replacement, so they shouldn’t be measured against the same “how much money did I make off this” metrics as your other campaigns.

I’m missing something, surely, so help me out and jog my memory in the comments, would ya?

Such a nugget dropped a little while ago, while Mrs. Zest was in the middle of her pediatrics rotation, and she related to me one of the fundamental rules she’d learned from the specialty: Kids are not little adults, so don’t treat them as such.

What a concept, right? Kids are diagnosed, treated and react to that treatment in their own unique way, so what goes for Grown-ups doesn’t directly translate. It’s not just a case of scaling down the dosages.

Marketing small businesses is its own animal in much the same way, which can cause complications and frustration when they try to mimic the marketing strategies they see being used by big brands – it’s not as simple as finding a way to do what they do, but cheaper. With this in mind, here are some of the major differences that you encounter at the smaller end of the scale:

You’re in touch with your customers

One small business advantage is the direct connection with your customers

As a small business owner, you’re as close as you’ll ever be to your customers, and maintaining and leveraging that relationship only becomes more difficult as you expand – until you can become so far removed that you have no idea what they think of you.

That personal connection, and the feeling of empowerment that comes with it is desirable to customers, and it’s one of the major advantages a small business has when it comes to figuring out their marketing strategies. Call it the Cheers effect – we all want to go someplace where everybody knows our name.

Another benefit of such close customer contact is that you can speak like a local, and represent yourself that way. Platforms that are hyper-focused on small businesses as landmarks of the neighborhood, like Locurious and MyTown, enable you to connect deeply with customers beyond the convenience of your location, and offer an alternative to diluting or sanitizing your message for mass appeal. It’s about getting your customers to think less like “That’s the closest coffee shop to my place”, and more like “That place is my coffee shop, and nowhere else knows me the way they do.”

You have less inertia

The bigger you get, the harder it is to change direction – fact. As budgets become allocated, processes become formalized, and seating arrangements consolidated, the petrification of past decisions sets in. When marketing small businesses, you have the luxury of being able to experiment to see what works best for you – usually without a large capital or logistical investment, or the pressure to focus-test an idea to death before it sees the light of day. Sometimes, such dabbling can pay big dividends.

Differentiation is critical

I’ve written about this before, but I’ll say it again: most small businesses rely only on their location to protect them from competition, but this quickly devolves into tit-for-tat discounting once a competitor moves into your turf. Whereas big brands can sometimes fall back on discounts and BOGO deals, finding your unique selling point is of critical importance as a small business, because it keeps you from being sucked into a price war with the local competition, which usually accomplishes nothing other than teaching customers to pay less for your product, even if you end up the winner.

Teaser campaigns are for movies – not sandwiches

What I mean by this is that some types of marketing just aren’t right for small businesses. Almost once a month, I hear a small business owner wish aloud that they could “do a teaser campaign to generate some buzz”, but this is missing the point – teaser campaigns only work if the reveal at the end of it all is worth it to customers. This is why it’s a common tactic for Hollywood tentpole summer flicks, the new year’s car lineup, and the next iPhone – things that people look forward to all year. Trying to place a sandwich or other such incongruous product in this category just isn’t a natural fit in the customer’s mind – otherwise, you’d see McDonalds doing it all the time.

What do you guys think, are there any other fundamental differences between small and big business marketing? Lemme know in the comments!

Partner up to make Mayorship valuable

Starbucks' partnership with Foursquare makes a great case study that other businesses will be keen to follow

The very premise of the Foursquare check-in – “Hey everyone, I’m at one of my favorite places right now!” – has the potential to completely replace one of the oldest mainstays of traditional CRM: the store loyalty card (more on this in a future post). It’s only recently that retail giants like Starbucks have begun to catch on with high-profile partnerships, and the initial attempts have already met with great enthusiasm and will likely percolate down to small/medium businesses rapidly. Foursquare has gotten this far with giving away simple bragging rights to users, but beating Facebook Places will mean providing more tangible perks in order to keep its value, now that the service’s mere existence is no longer a novelty.

Faster/more accurate check-ins

With raised stakes comes a heavy responsibility to keep better track of things like check-ins and mayorships. When the perks take on tangible monetary value, maintaining people’s trust in the platform’s reliability and integrity will become of paramount importance – the “relax, it’s just a game” excuse just won’t fly any more. This isn’t currently a problem exclusive to Foursquare, (as Walt Mossberg describes in his first take on Facebook Places, around the 2:48 mark) but I guarantee that some poor team of GPS/data security engineers will be burning the midnight oil over this when they decide to get serious about tracking check ins, as it’ll become even more important to participants that their travels are recorded – and rewarded – accurately.

Make the online/offline experience seamless

This is the “Go big, or go home” play. I believe Foursquare could create its own embeddable button or widget to allow members to check in for digital destinations as well as physical – meaning that it becomes a platform that allows customers to be seamlessly recognized on brands’ and businesses’ online properties and content as well as within their physical stores. Checking-in for virtual entities like TV and other entertainment media is not an entirely new idea (Miso and GetGlue were quick to establish themselves in that respect), but Foursquare is the player with the critical mass and name recognition to make the concept work at scale, and facilitate people sharing their experiences with friends, whether they occur virtually or ‘IRL’ (I know, what is this, 2002?). Expect big repercussions for the real-time web, should Foursquare dare to tread this path. That, plus, the online privacy mavens will have a collective aneurysm.

Enable public leaderboards

Foursquare can beat Facebook places by ratcheting up the competition between its users

Much like the updates printed on receipts that tell you how much more you have to spend to get that preferred customer BOGO deal, publicizing the leaderboards for individual venues will be a boon in stimulating incremental foot traffic to stores. Opening up that data to businesses could also pave the way for all kinds of fascinating interactive point-of-purchase display possibilities, visualizing the continual struggle among customers for the mayorship spot.

Make more winners

There can only be so many mayors, but customers will all want their fair shot at recognition. Foursquare can increase participation by expanding the set of titles that can be awarded. Although the badges are nice, they’ll quickly become worthless if mayorships are the only titles with tangible rewards. Vice-mayorships will only be the start – the system could very well expand to be a virtual state senate’s-worth of different titles (and associated perks) based on members’ checkin behavior.

What do you think? Does Foursquare have any other plays open to it in light of Facebook’s announcement? Sound off below in the comments, soldier!

Take 90 seconds out of your day, and you’ll be able to sound smart and move on, leaving the deeper learning for later on, when time is a little more bountiful. Best of all, I provide these decks under a Creative Commons license, meaning you can download, share, modify and enjoy them however you want, so long as you kick me back a little acknowledgement.

Why is Branding Important for Small Businesses?

Do you have a burning marketing question that you just can’t get a straight answer to? Email me to suggest a topic, or leave one in the comments below. Brains, I need BRAINS!

Well, let’s hold on just a second – while there may be a few fundamental approaches to marketing strategy, there’s a definitely an art to figuring out which one to apply, and when. But that, dear reader, is a different topic for a different post. The here and now is concerned with the strategic building blocks with which I (and others like me) build your marketing cathedral. Time and again, I’ve seen each of these general approaches, applied at the right time and executed correctly – sometimes individually, and other times in combination – significantly help my clients reach their marketing goals. I share them with you now (sucker ):

Make an awesome product

“Wait a minute, that’s Operations’ job! It has nothing to do with marketing”. Wrong, just…wrong, man. In a crowded marketplace, product innovation makes you stand out, which coincidentally is what good marketing does –  I submit that they are one and the same. That means when Operations Ian meets regularly with Marketing Michaela to make sweet cross-functional team love in the conference room, it often results in products that put a serious dent in reality.

Word of mouth has been a marketing tool since the dawn of Homo Sapiens, but today more than ever, customers have the power to promote the products they love to an audience orders of magnitude larger than they were ever able to before, so if your product is awesome enough, with just the slightest nudge, people will market it for you.

EXAMPLE: Basecamp by 37Signals

Fish where the fish are

From the outset, marketers have always followed customers. Then social media turned everything on its ear and allowed customers to follow and friend marketers. Nevertheless, this particular strategy has not had to change with the times – in order to make the most of your marketing dollars, make sure you’re establishing a presence among customers who are likely to convert. That’s why you don’t see tampon commercials on Spike TV, Budweiser billboards in Amish country, or Norton Antivirus promoted in Apple stores (ooh, burn!).

By shortening the distance between your message and your target audience, you’ll be spending your budget more efficiently, and reaching more potential customers. The trick is figuring out where your customers are…

EXAMPLE: Mobile food trucks + Twitter = Instant line of customers

Be good enough right now, not perfect eventually

Be Kind Rewind is actually all about excellent small business marketing strategy. And household special effects.

Those of you who’ve been here a while know I keep repeating this, but I’ll say it again: we’re living in the age of “Good Enough’ – is it easy to use, is it available right now, and most importantly, will it get the job done? Examples of this newly-identified customer mentality are all around us, from the popularity of the Freemium business model, to the rise of the “Sweding” phenomenon. Gone are the days when perfection is a requisite – hell, some companies have been loyal Gmail users from the get-go, despite the fact that the application was in Beta-testing for over 5 years.

The same approach is key to your marketing efforts – speed and relevance will trump perfection almost every time. Get it out there, get it up and running, and add polish in version 2.0. Note that this isn’t a free pass for sloppy work – rather, don’t lose precious time agonizing over details that the majority either don’t notice or care about. In the words of the inimitable Seth Godin: “ship”.

EXAMPLE: The Flip video camera

Integrate your channels

Today’s media is splintered into thousands of tiny fragments, along with your customers’ attention spans. It’s no longer as simple as distinguishing between “online” and “offline”, and a single message in one lonely channel is often quickly forgotten. Marketing campaigns nowadays envelope their target audience – they need to see the TV spot, glance at the online banner, and comment on the YouTube parody videos before your message begins to sink in. This is why ad agencies today are clamoring for creative people who have the ability to translate their ideas across multiple channels effectively.

To get noticed,  be present in multiple places at the same time, and get in front of the same individual multiple times in order to reap the most benefit from your efforts.

EXAMPLE: Old Spice Man campaign

Tell a story

Unless you’re executing a quick, short-lived promotion, planning for the evolution of your message will keep people interested for the campaign’s duration. This means: don’t blast out the exact same message over and over – they heard you the first time, meaning that with each duplication, you’re only being ignored.

The most successful, long-lived campaigns tell your business’ story – they hold back in the beginning, and release a steady stream of interesting, differentiated information that evolves over time, to keep people coming back and paying attention.

EXAMPLE: Johnny Walker, the man who walked around the world

What other core marketing strategies do you see out there? Let me know what I missed in the comments, why don’tcha?

Putting out a marketing campaign is all well and good, but if you’re in it for the long haul, chances are you’re aiming to achieve more than simply cluttering up the media landscape. But how do you know whether your goals are realistic, or if they’re even the right goals to be shooting for in the first place? Quiet thine troubled mind and read on, dear entrepreneurial comrade.

Although the temptation is to dive right in when it comes to getting your marketing up and running, good goal-setting is an essential preliminary step. It’s what guides all of your actions, and provides much needed clarity when you’re faced with decisions to make. Don’t forget also, that having a clear goal means you know without a doubt when you’ve made concrete progress. Having nonexistent/fuzzy goals can make you feel like you’re grinding away at a neverending task – conversely, when you know you’ve hit a goal, it’s a great feeling, and will motivate you to make more!

So without further ado, here’s how to create good goals that make you feel more like David Villa, and less like Sisyphus and his pet rock. Good marketing goals all have the following common traits:

1) They’re quantifiable

The title for most awesome umbrella manufacturer is taken. I suggest you try something else.

The only way you can know you’ve reached a goal is to be measuring it, so it stands to reason that your objective must be something measurable. Sure, it can stir up the troops more if you proclaim that you aim to be the most awesome umbrella manufacturer in the civilized world, but grand sweeping statements like these are best kept in the mission statement, and left out of the marketing plan. A good marketing goal along these lines would be something like “We aim to have the highest customer satisfaction of any umbrella manufacturer in the Western Hemisphere.”

2) They’re ambitious, but realistic

There’s a fine line between ambition and delusion, so by all means aim high – just don’t kid yourself about your small business’ chances of rattling Coke’s cage on a three-figure budget (doable, but difficult).

One way to strike this fine balance is with a back-of-the-napkin market sizing exercise. Let’s say that you’re aiming to generate $100,000 in sales of your $10 product. In order to reach this goal, you’ll need at least 10,000 sales, and no returns, right? Using the rule of thumb that you’ll probably convert about 1% of your target audience into paying customers, you therefore need to reach at the very least a total of 1 million potential customers to have a chance of reaching that particular goal. With this number in mind, you can then figure out whether enough potential customers exist in the marketplace to support your goal.

Don’t be ruled by the numbers when setting your goals, but do use them as a gut-check to make sure you’re not setting your campaign up for failure before it’s even begun.

3) They’re relevant

While important, your marketing efforts are inextricably linked to the rest of your business, so it pays not to have blinders on when nailing them down. Consider the broader strategic picture: if new leads are booming, but your customer retention rate is struggling, your marketing should aim to address that weakness, not simply continue to bring in new leads. Resist myopia – make sure that whatever goal you set for your marketing efforts is beneficial to the business’ overall standing, not just marketing for marketing’s sake.

What say you, friend? Is there anything I’ve missed that goes into setting a good marketing goal? Let me hear your thoughts in the comments!

Me: “Hello?”

Caller: “Hi, my name is Jeri. I’m calling from [COMPANY], and we’re a rubber band and rubber glove manufacturer. Do you need any of these?”

Me: “Um…no…”

Caller: “Ok, thanks.” *click*

Wow. Someone was being paid to simply call a list of numbers to see if they needed rubber bands and/or gloves. These numbers were obviously not filtered by the type of company, size of the company, or even who would be on the other end of the line, whether it was the mailroom or the boardroom. What an absolute waste of time and energy.

Once I’d gotten over the random hail mary-ness of this effort, I realized that companies are still spending money on this kind of brute-force and wasteful method of marketing when there are so many other ways to reach out and connect with potential customers – many of them completely free, more likely to generate credible leads or new sources of revenue, and requiring not much more than a little creativity. So, I decided to put some cheddar where my cakehole is, and prove it. Here you go, Randomly Cold-Calling Rubber Band & Rubber Gloves Inc.^TM, 25 things that you’re better off spending your marketing budget on (you’re welcome):

Do you have any other ideas? Let me hear them in the comments! If we get to 100, I might just give this company a call back and present these ideas to them…

Don’t ask them to work for free (it’s just rude)

It’s true, it really is. If you were a plumber, and someone asked you to fix their sink “just to make sure they’re the right person for the job”, you’d likely  decline. Asking a freelancer to give you work for free is not fair, and not good business.

Local or long-distance?

There are two schools of thought on this one. One side says that the best talent is everywhere, and that communication is instantaneous enough and ubiquitous enough today that there’s nothing stopping you from collaborating effectively with someone far away. The other side is wary of the lack of legal protections, cultural understanding and quality, therefore opting to stay local. Each has its pros and cons – working with people far away may mean early-morning or late-night conference calls, while only hiring local may mean missing out on excellent talent that costs less than the local market.

My opinion? It depends on what your needs are – if you like a freelancer’s portfolio, that’s usually all you need to know. If your project is complex, and requires a deep understanding of your market, or actual facetime, then stay local. For all other jobs, talent is talent. Experiment with small jobs to find what works for you.

Be organized

This means knowing in advance how much you want to spend, what you need to get out of this project, and who will be running things from your end. Every marketing project is a partnership between the marketer and the client – the client provides the insight of your business and customers, and the marketer provides the skills and expertise to convey your message. Having a clear idea of these points will ensure that your project stays focused, and on track.

Challenge them to be creative

You'd be surprised how far you can get without these

By allowing your freelancer with some latitude to approach your job, you free them up to come up with solutions that are better than anything you might have envisioned. The more restrictions you put around the job, the less likely it is that your expectations will be exceeded.

React with your gut

Reviewing a piece of work can oftentimes be difficult, involving hours spent pondering over pro’s and cons, second-guessing and mind-changing. Solid decisions are frequently made in the blink of an eye, though – much like how your customers will when they see a piece of work for the first time. Therefore, when presented with a piece of work, take note of your gut reaction to it. Don’t block out other considerations, but don’t necessarily reject them outright, simply because they occurred to you in the first couple of seconds.

Choose an option – don’t just eliminate all the others

It’s a typical approach to, when presented with a number of options, begin whittling down the group to arrive at the answer. While this is usually a rational approach, you can frequently find yourself choosing an option simply because it’s the last man standing – so therefore it has to be the best – which isn’t exactly the passion and enthusiasm with which you should be moving in a certain direction. Like the above tip, make sure that the option you pick is something you know you can get behind, and it’ll show through in the work.

Start small

You're probably not going to ride that just yet

Hey entrepreneurs, a little marketing advice: your social media efforts are not a flashmob – simply putting something out there, and expecting to ride an instant, surging wave of customer goodwill to fame and fortune is unrealistic in the extreme, and will only lead to disillusionment, despair, and ultimately you publicly declaring the internet to be a fad that’ll blow over in the next 6 months.

Pick a platform that you feel comfortable with, and that you know your customers are using – if your writing skills are lacking, establish yourself on video-sharing sites such as YouTube or Vimeo. Got a face made for radio? Well, there are plenty of places where your shining wordsmithery or photography skills can dazzle.

Basically, start building an audience in one place, so they can not only see and interact with you, but also see and interact with each other. Consolidating activity around one social media venue in the beginning makes it far easier to cultivate a community that perpetuates itself than if you were to stretch yourself thin across multiple outposts that lose all activity unless you’re continually seeding it with updates. Think of it as spinning plates – it’s far easier to spin one large plate, instead of dashing around to maintain 8 smaller ones.

Be human

Blithely reciting your elevator pitch over and over at a friend’s cocktail party is a quick way to find yourself uninvited next time the drinks are flowing, and the same applies here – people know when they’re being fed a line, and don’t typically look upon it too kindly. Think about some of the best conversations that you’ve had at a party – chances are the person you talked to told interesting stories, made you laugh, and asked you genuine questions about yourself. There’s something innately human about exchanging this kind of information, and it’s what leads to deeper relationships between us. Strive to be a good conversationalist, no matter which social media outlet you’re using. That means listening, responding, and being sincere.

Forget perfection

Content just doesn’t have the staying power that it used to – it gets stale fast, meaning that perfection and polish often must be sacrificed upon the altar of speed and relevance. And you know what, that’s ok! The law of “Good Enough” is in full effect in social media marketing, because useful information and engaging content usually remains that way regardless of the packaging. So forget the AP style guidelines and rite how yoo speek. Skip the film crew, and grab a Flip camera (or use something like Qik and broadcast live with your smartphone). You get the idea.

Use video

Speaking of Flip cameras, if a picture’s worth a thousand words, a video is worth about 33 billion. Oh, and also? YouTube is the world’s largest video search engine, and results are 50 times more likely to rank on the first page, over blog posts and other textual content on Google. “So then why isn’t your post a video instead, smart guy?”. That’s an excellent question, uh…today’s laundry day. Moving swiftly on!

Track and follow your fans

Use a tracking service to follow your fans with 50% less ineptitude

Over time and multiple interactions, you’ll be able to see who your most ardent fans are, but you’ll be able to make far more informed decisions if you keep track of who these fans are, and how they’re interacting with your company. Are they blogging about you? Posting video reactions to your content? Tweeting about it?

There are a bunch of relatively new services that have sprung up to help you easily track activity around your social media communities and tease out these kinds of valuable insights. Here are a few –  check ‘em out, and see which one is right for you:

• Flowtown – lets you see which social media platforms your customers use, and who they’re connected to. Bonus points for integration with MailChimp and CampaignMonitor – two of the best email service providers around.
• Swix – Kind of like Google Analytics for social media, Swix offers a nice, easy-to-use dashboard that gives you a good overview of how your activities are helping to grow (or shrink) your audience over time
• Radian6 – The big boys use Radian6 for large-scale social media monitoring, but you’d likely be surprised at how affordable it is.

There is a definite learning curve, however (as any small business marketing consultant will tell you): every subscriber list is unique, and will respond to different messaging and approaches. To really get the best out of email marketing, you’ll be learning what the hooks and triggers are that get your subscribers to respond, and constantly developing new ways of reaching them within this channel. The following are the first few steps and things you’ll want to consider on your way towards building an active email subscriber list.

#1 Why email?

For many things in life, having a clearly-defined objective is key to getting a good start, and email marketing is no different. Knowing this ahead of time will help guide the types of messages you create, the frequency with which you send them, and importantly, how you measure success (more on this later). Some examples:

• Increase traffic to a specific area of your website
• Drive sales of a new product
• Stimulate foot traffic to your store
• Gain deeper insight into what your customers want
• Maintain contact with your customers in-between store or website visits

#2 Find a platform

Unless you’re not planning on sending to more than 10 people at a time, you should definitely sign up with an Email Service Provider (ESP), reason being that the actual process of getting a large quantity of email from point A to point B is an absolute minefield these days, fraught with dangers such as spam filters, phishing traps, and recipients who are overly zealous with the “Mark as spam” button – any of which mean the difference between your carefully crafted message being read, and it languishing in the unseen dungeon known as the Junk folder.

When choosing an ESP, you really just need to know your budget and the features you need. Some will tell you that you need flexibility in your ESP’s platform to accommodate more complex types of campaigns, but to me, all that’s important there is the ability to easily move your customers’ data to another provider, if necessary. There’s a wealth of different services out there, each with differing levels of complexity and robustness, as well as payment models – most do subscriptions, although some charge per email sent, or per subscriber on your list. Here are some that have shown themselves to be solid marketing platforms in my past experience:

Small/medium business

• MailChimp
• CampaignMonitor
• Constant Contact
• MyEmma

Medium/Large business

• ExactTarget
• Acxiom Digital
• Vertical Response

#3 Create your content

With your goal(s) set, you’ll next need to turn your attention to what you want to talk about, i.e. your content. What kinds of topics would your subscribers want to hear about? What kinds of information would be valuable to them and elicit a reaction? Would that reaction be in line with your marketing objectives?

Typically, email marketing content falls into three broad categories: Informational, for example monthly newsletters, Promotional, where you push offers and discounts, and Transactional, e.g. signup confirmations or other messages triggered in response to a user’s action. Figure out which category/categories you have the appropriate content for, and think of ways to tie your content into your objectives. For example, to drive more foot traffic to your store, consider offering a printable coupon only redeemable in-store. To keep your brand at the top of your customers’ minds, think about creating a regular email newsletter, and so on. Campaign Monitor does a good roundup of the types of email marketing.

#4 Start building a subscriber list

This stage of your quest for email domination will arguably be the longest and continually-evolving. The search for subscribers is what will keep your list growing, responsive and healthy, and is ultimately what will keep your investment in email marketing a profitable one. The following are several of the more common list-building techniques:

Online subscription form

Sometimes, it’s as simple as asking. Place a short and simple sign-up form on your website in a location where it’s easily found – this could be on your homepage, in the header of every page, in a sidebar, etc. Just by having the sign-up form easily accessible, you’ll begin to pick up subscribers who find your website’s content engaging, and would like updates as they happen.

Partnership emails

Many businesses offer partners the opportunity to send marketing messages to their subscriber lists, usually for a fee, depending on the size of their list, and other factors. Use these partner sends to concentrate on signing these recipients up to your own list – that way you don’t have to spend as much money to reach them a second time.

Offer/Sweepstakes

Sweepstakes with an attractive prize can net you a huge number of subscribers in a short period of time, but beware: oftentimes, folks just want the prize, so you may find that quantity doesn’t make up for quality.

Forward to a Friend

Forward to a Friend (or FTAF) was social media before there was social media. Give your subscribers the chance to become your ambassadors by enabling them to easily forward your emails to their friends, along with a short message encouraging them to subscribe. Many email service providers offer the ability to encode this functionality into your email addresses, (and increasingly integrating social media sharing functions also) so by all means, FTAF away!

#5 Define your Key Performance Metrics

The key to a successful ongoing email program is the continual optimization of your sending practices, your content and target audience – none of which is possible if you don’t keep track of how your emails are performing. There are a number of metrics associated with email campaigns, but you should pay particular attention to those that are directly aligned with your overall strategic marketing goals. As an example, if driving website traffic is your primary goal, you’ll want to track and benchmark the Clickthrough Rate, since this will help you build a picture over time of what types of content your subscribers respond to best. The following are some standard email marketing metrics:

• Delivered rate – The percentage of emails you sent that made it to people’s inboxes. This should be between 97-99% for any opt-in subscriber list
• Open rate – The number of people who opened your email, versus the number who simply received it, and took no action. This is often an indicator of how compelling your subject line was.
• Clickthrough rate – How many recipients clicked through to your site, versus how many simply opened the email
• Unsubscribe rate – The number of people who unsubscribed from your mailing list, compared to the number of recipients of the email. Another good indicator of how engaging your content is. For almost any campaign, your unsubscribe rate should be below 1%.

Well, that should be enough to get you started – stay tuned for more email marketing advice (finely tuned for small businesses and entrepreneurs) in future posts!

#1: This has all happened before, and will happen again

Facebook’s unleashing of a phalanx of embeddable widgets isn’t the first, but is definitely the most high-profile episode in a wider movement away from destination portals (think Yahoo! homepage) towards becoming part of the infrastructure of the internet itself. I go into this in detail over at Convince and Convert, Jason Baer’s excellent social media strategy blog that’ll make you 10x smarter with every post. With little colonies of Facebook’s functionality and content popping up on sites all over the web, it’s not hard to see it as the new AOL – an increasingly privately-owned gateway to the internet for many. Indeed if this goes far enough, future generations may rarely venture beyond the walls of the Facebook-controlled web.

Don’t think that all the other social media giants have been simply sitting back and laughing at Facebook’s public flogging, though – copious notes have been taken and far-reaching plans are being hastily adjusted in war rooms as you read this. Others will dare to tread this path, albeit perhaps softer and at a slower pace than ol’ Zuckerberg did.

#2: It’s a Good News/Bad News Scenario

Now that the internet has a shot at becoming Serious Business, steps are being taken to bring it under control, and merge your on- and offline personas. This is ostensibly good and bad.

It’s good, because:

• We’re getting closer to the extinction of online anonymity, and with it the Greater Internet Dickwad. As more of your actions and contributions online are able to be tracked back to you personally, there’s a strong disincentive to acting like, well, an anonymous dick. If you wouldn’t say it in real life, it’s becoming less likely you’ll write it online.
• Doing away with having to remember non-sensitive login info, because you’ll always be logged in – again, I think Jay Baer says it best: “your preferences will follow you around like a puppy online”. Social networking platforms provide the breadcrumb trail for those preferences to follow, although Firefox may something to say about that.
• Umm…saving the carbon generated by unnecessary visits to Facebook proper…?

It’s bad, because:

• Erm, we’re getting closer to the extinction online anonymity. One wrong “Like” could be a major public embarassment.
• As with any 3rd party embedded service, it’s not under your control. When (not if) Facebook goes down, so do large parts of many people’s websites, to varying degrees.
• Facebook’s checkered past with data privacy provides ample fodder for concern. Enough toes have been stepped on enough times for there to be legitimate question marks hanging over Facebook’s intentions. Granted, like any other company, they’re out to make a buck, but is it through cultivating a thriving, engaged community, or at its expense? The default opt-in nature of even the latest revision to its privacy controls shows a disdain for the public’s ‘quaint’ notion of what should be private versus public.
• The line of demarcation between your website and our social network is becoming blurred, setting the stage for a titanic struggle over who owns the data – the ultimate prize in all this.
• Should the ‘Like’ button catch on, there’s a strong disincentive for anyone other than Facebook to bother collecting customers’ preference data – how can independently-operated sites hope to compete with a consolidated database that is fed by the combined activity of 400 million (and counting) users across the entire internet? ReadWriteWeb is spot on about content publishers/distributors fearing Facebook‘s most recent moves – their carefully curated databases of consumer preferences are acutely threatened by Facebook’s ability to amass this type of asset quickly.

Somewhere, there's a terrified huddle of Netflix database engineers wondering if Facebook's Like button is about to kill their baby

Perfect example: Netflix. Their eerily-accurate (for the most part) recommendation engine was one of their strongest advantages over Blockbuster’s floundering efforts online – which in turn is swiftly undercut by a few well-placed ‘Like’ buttons on movie websites feeding precise preference data back to Facebook at a staggering rate.

Rest-assured, ripples will continue to be felt around this issue, but for now, that’s all I’ve got. How about you?

UPDATE: Jay Baer talks about some of the more recent Facebook developments along these lines over here.

That’s right, at its new annual Chirp conference, Twitter announced its intent to go the Google route of letting user activity/participation determine which advertisers’ content gets the premium treatment – in Twitter’s case, a highlight around the tweet in question – a trait dubbed ‘Resonance‘. In essence, the more a marketer’s tweet gets @-replied, re-tweeted, or otherwise jives with the Twitter-verse at large, the more people will see it – think ripples in the pond in response to a dropped pebble. As activity dies off around the tweet, it fades from users’ streams, and is replaced by the next most engagement-worthy post.

So why is this interesting? Well for one, it marks one of the first attempts by a social media platform to monetize user activity around content outside of the traditional “if someone writes about ham, show them a ham banner ad” approach, also known as relevance, which can prove to be inaccurate, and even irrelevant in many cases. But for me, the most interesting thing is that this may mark the early stages of the era of User Venerated Content, which, unlike its older, more freewheeling sibling User Generated Content, acts as a meritocracy by default – marketing content that gets people talking will be automatically elevated to reach more eyeballs, while content that is of limited appeal will continue to be ignored, or possibly even hidden from view. If ever there was a mechanism to encourage good, thoughtful advertising, this is it.

With Twitter being the big player it is nowadays, you can expect that the other social media giants are looking at this approach and furiously grinding their brain-gears over to how to incorporate a similar philosophy into their own platforms (if they hadn’t already begun). Right alongside them, are the marketers and advertisers, scratching scalps, and wondering how the hell to start with yet another new social media metric they need to explain to their clients. While Twitter’s new ad platform represents a tremendous new opportunity, content here really is king, with unengaging, boring or irrelevant tweets truly being filtered out.

Radian6 and others are poised to make tons o' cash if resonance catches on as a meaningful metric

It’s not an insurmountable task, but will require commitment to a rigorous and rapid test-and-learn cycle on the part of agencies that want to come out on top here. Social media monitoring tools will be mandatories here, as marketers tweet, track the response, optimize, rinse and repeat. The benefits to whoever figures out the special ingredient in this secret Resonance sauce will likely find fame and fortune – not just on Twitter, but with any SM platform that begins to offer promoted content based on resonance. In the meantime, social media monitoring vendors like Radian6‘s palms are probably smoking from being vigorously rubbed together in anticipatory glee over the landslide of new agency business they’re going to get as a result of this. Hopefully, they’ll give the poor software engineer who’s tasked with creating the “Resonance Reporting Dashboard” update a nice vacation once the dust settles.

They are, of course, all paid product placements from Microsoft’s Bing, in a bid to unseat the dominance of Google over the common internet lexicon – in this case, ‘Googling’. But here’s where it seems to me to fall flat: when a brand or product becomes a commonly-used term, it’s an earned accolade bestowed as a reward for being so deeply entwined and in tune with consumers’ needs that it becomes an unspoken understanding between them. This is not something you can buy, and attempts to do so come off as awkward and disingenuous.

Simply put, sorry Microsoft, but “Bing-ing” ain’t gonna happen.

It’s just plain weird to hear characters tell each other to “Bing” something, or have a commercial entreat me to “Bing” their keyword. It sounds forced, which ironically is the exact opposite of what the whole venture is ostensibly trying to achieve. Acting like people talk about searching for information online in this way doesn’t make it so. Worse still, it’s similar to when, as a teenager, your parents gamely tried to use your latest slang word to try and ‘relate’.

Can you feel the shudders rippling up and down your spine yet?

But despite that dire last sentence, working with freelance help to get your small business’ marketing work done doesn’t have to be that hard. This post is the first in a series that’ll give you entrepreneurs some tips, tricks and rules of thumb to keep in mind when working with a hired gun. Who knows? You may just find your next rockstar employee this way.

Get it in writing

For the love of all that is holy, please make sure that whatever agreement you come to is solidified in writing. Chances are good that any halfway-professional freelancer you deal with will be keen on this too. A mutually-agreed contract prevents your arrangement devolving into a he-said, she-said situation, which is frustration to the nth power for everyone. Regardless of the type of help you need, a decent contract should cover (at a minimum) the following topics:

1. The goal/deliverables of the job
2. The timeframe in which it’ll be done
3. How responsibilities of the job will be divided up
4. How much it’ll cost (either an estimate or fixed fee)
5. How you’ll pay, whether it’s an upfront fee, 50/50 or otherwise
6. An out clause

Pay attention to #6, as it comes into effect if things go wrong. The out clause should offer a fair resolution to both parties in the event that the contract has to be terminated before the job is completed, for whatever reason.

Indecision tends to cost you in the freelance world

Be decisive (mind-reading costs extra)

Whether it’s knowing what you want when describing the job to a freelancer, or providing feedback on a piece of work that they’re showing you, being decisive will ultimately save you time and money. That second part is especially important, as if your feedback is not clear, or you can’t commit to a direction, you’re leaving a freelancer guessing as to what it is that you want, which will likely lead to them spending more time on the job than is necessary, and you spending more dollars than you anticipated. This cuts both ways – a good designer or copywriter will probe, ask questions, and challenge some of your direction to get a crystal clear understanding of what you need, but you can’t always rely on them to pull it out of you.

Don’t be afraid to not like something – but explain why

Following on from the previous point, sometimes your decisiveness will mean that you need to say no. It’s ok, it happens – but it’s critical that you a) tell your freelancer that it’s not quite what you want, and b) explain exactly why it’s not working for you. This is a common part of the creative process in marketing, and it happens every day to thousands of freelancers all over the world. They’ll get over it (mostly – some scars do remain, though *sniff*). Often times, you’ll feel the need to tell them exactly how to solve the problem – “I think we should make the headline neon green and put it in Comic Sans font” – but you should try to resist this, unless there’s a very good reason why you’d need certain things done precisely that way, the reason being that…

This guy likely didn't listen to his designer. Which would've been tough, because they were probably screaming.

They’re the expert

The reason you hired this person in the first place is because you lack their skills in-house, so it makes sense not to tell them how to do the job, right? Recognize that they’re the expert in this area, and let them help you – 90% of them genuinely want to, because few things are more coveted in the freelance world than a happy repeat client. Now, this doesn’t mean you have to blindly agree with everything they suggest, but it does mean you’ll need to put your trust in them from time to time.

At its most basic, marketing is about changing people’s behavior – getting them to spend differently, go to different places and perceive things in a new way. By this standard, we’re all marketers in some form or another, and the basic elements that your startup business needs to begin marketing are analogous to what we as individuals use to influence each other:

Anonymity is great for upper-class thieves and witness protection program folks, but not your business

1. An identity
This is your logo, your company name, your slogan – in short, this is your business’ face. Over time, people come to recognize it, and it projects the voice and persona of your business, aka your brand. Your identity should be consistent everywhere it is present, otherwise which version of your company is the customer speaking to? How can they be sure they’re speaking to Acme Widgets, and not Acne Widgets? Though it can be tempting, consistency is key to any effective brand.

To put it another way, you wouldn’t get facial reconstructive surgery every time you spoke to someone new, right? If you would, I’m afraid you have problems beyond the scope of this blog’s expertise.

2. A reason for being
This is also known as your business’ “value proposition”. Why should customers care about your business? Do you do it cheaper, faster or better than the other guy/gal? This question goes to the heart of the reason why you as an entrepreneur started your business in the first place – why is it a good decision for people to give you their money, instead of someone else? You can’t assume that such information is self-evident, unless you happen to be selling popsicles in the sub-Saharan. This reason should sing out above all else in your small business’ marketing messages. People should know why you matter.

You might be able to afford an endorsement now.

3. A budget
Don’t take this the wrong way – this isn’t some elitist snub where I scoff at your meagre resources. For our purposes, a budget is simply the amount you know you can spend on your marketing efforts, and it typically falls somewhere between $0 and $infinity (if you’re toward the higher end of that scale, we should talk). Having a firm number in mind is an important factor in determining which types of marketing will be the most effective for you. If you have $0 to spend, don’t center your marketing plan around an endorsement from Tiger Woods (although he may have come down in price somewhat); if you have $infinity, why the hell are you even working?

4. A website
Here’s where the wheels fall off of my hoighty-toighty metaphor, but we’ll press on, regardless. A good website is critical to any startup marketing campaign today, as it serves as the official source for any and all information about you and allows you to manage your fledgling reputation. A website also enables people to find you online, something which many consumers do before even setting foot in any establishment. Plus, marketing materials alone are seldom enough to motivate someone to get off the couch and physically visit a business just to find out more information about it.

Your website acts as the hub to which all your marketing materials will drive traffic. Kind of like how people stalk each other on Facebook after meeting in person…(aaand we’re back on track with the metaphor, excellent).

5. A goal
Finally, the why. Why are you marketing in the first place? Is it to increase the number of sales, the amount of each sale, or simply to announce that you exist and drive traffic by foot/mouse/camel? By setting the goals you wish to reach with your marketing efforts, you make it much easier to frame your decisions within that context, and judge whether or not the tactics you use are successful in helping you reach them.

So you’ve navigated the weird and wonderful world of Craigslist/Elance/99Designs or any of the other regular freelancer haunts, and turned up what seems to be the perfect freelance designer for your small business. How can you figure out whether they’re the right person for the job? A little due diligence, that’s how:

What follows, my friends, is a short list of the top 10 questions that any small business should be able to answer about a freelancer before hiring them for your marketing projects:

1. Have they done similar work to my job before?
Experience always shows through in the work – but don’t focus on this at the expense of talent, as there are many enthusiastic young designers just itching to get some real-world work under their belt

2. Do they understand the medium?
Don’t hire a webdesign specialist for your catalog job, and vice-versa. There be tears that way yonder, believe me.

3. How/when will they deliver the source files?
Without these, you’ll encounter many severe headaches down the line, when/if you need to adjust the work, or hire someone else to continue work in the same vein.

4. How are the responsibilities for this project divvied up?
Almost every project will require some collaboration, so make sure to establish up front what you’re responsible for, and what your freelancer is agreeing to do for you – saves nasty surprises down the road.

5. What are the key milestones of this project, and when will they occur?
Project timelines are key to keeping a job on-track and under-budget. Beware if your freelancer cannot commit to a specific timeline before beginning work.

6. What is the “Out” clause if this doesn’t work out?
A professional freelancer will have some kind of termination clause written into their proposal, governing what happens if either you or they decide to end the project before completion. Take a good look at the terms – are they fair to both parties? Most importantly, will you get everything you need to continue the project with someone else?

Believe it or not, there are ways to make conference calls worse.

7. How will we communicate?
Establishing the rules of engagement upfront will help the  project run a bit smoother – you’ll know how to get in touch with questions, and they won’t call you at 3am to look things over – double-win!

8. Is their style right for the job?
This one you have to answer for yourself – eye of the beholder and all that. But as a guide, the designer with only uber-trendy grunge work in their portfolio may not be the best choice for your investors’ annual report, or the copywriter with solemn shakespearean prose may not be the right fit for your store’s limited-time clearance sale – but be sure to ask for samples of similar work, in case they have hidden talents.

9. Do they have any references?
Just because they’re not interviewing for a fulltime position, doesn’t mean you can’t ask to speak to some of their past clients. As with question #1, younger freelancers may not have as much real-world experience, and therefore past clients, so don’t use this as the sole basis for your decision to pass up someone who could be an absolute rockstar.

10. What do they need from you?
In many cases, you’ll need to provide raw materials such as photos, content, and other background information to get the most out of your freelancer, so make sure you’re clear as to what that is.

Howdy, stranger, and welcome to The Zest!

My name’s Jason, and I’m a small business marketing consultant in San Diego, CA. The thing that keeps me enthralled with marketing is that it’s constantly evolving and changing beyond everyone’s expectations, which can also mean that it’s easy even for the modern-day Don Drapers among us to get left behind, shrugging and asking ourselves “What the what?”.

"I'd read The Zest every day, if I was real."

Fear not, however, for I started The Zest to give you regular spritzes of fresh marketing information, tips and updates to help you catch- or keep up. Over time, I intend for this blog to evolve into a comprehensive small business resource for my fellow marketers, as well as non-marketing entrepreneurs who realize its importance in maintaining a healthy flow of customers and leads – but don’t know where to start.

Ok, here’s the catch: my ulterior motive for starting this blog is your brains. Sorry. The more of your juicy, wriggling, fertile minds I can lure here with the promise of enlightenment, the more I can feast upon your own experiences and insights. So don’t be shy – feel free to comment, email me, and even tweet your mind, using the hashtag, #thezest. I only ask that you keep it constructive, spirited and proper – like if you were having tea with the Queen, but she’s getting progressively sauced on the shots of gin that she keeps slipping into the pot, so the discussion is drifting just south of ordinary decorum…

Read, consume, digest and most of all, enjoy!