In front of a campfire people share stories.  They interact, they engage, they ask things fearlessly, getting to know each other, and they contribute to the conversation.    They also take the time to sip their drink and just listen.

Businesses that communicate well with their community do the same. They know who is important to them and strive to create a central place of warmth that their community can sit around both online and offline using a clever mix of communications and interactions to bring them together regularly.

As confident communicators these businesses share stories about their experiences and observations online with their community on blogs and drive engagement through social media.   They hold events that guide, lead, inform and share ideas.  They ask things fearlessly online and offline, and get to know their clients and prospects well.  They contribute to the conversation in their community, and they listen well to what the community wants and needs.

Contrary to many business’s believes creating a community around your business is so much more than just pushing out an enewsletter every month and throwing a party every year.  It doesn’t take that much more effort, but it takes a different approach to the people around you.

How can you build warmth around your business?

Give more, more often

Abandon purely self-promotory newsletters and online presences and select some ways of communicating that are interactive.  As a professional you need to give your community ideas and opportunities and build conversation so they can get to know you and trust you, and choose to engage with you; rather than telling them how great you are and hoping they will buy you.

Interactive communications build and demonstrate your thought leadership over time, and give valuable ideas and information to your community.  Articles, blogs and social media are the best places to start.  These supplement an offline marketing and BD program well and add warmth to your business.     The tools like WordPress, Blogger, Mailchimp, Linkedin, Twitter, and even Facebook  are all free and easy to use.

Stay humble, don’t self promote all the time

One of the unwritten rules of building warmth in your marketing is to stay humble and resist sending out overly self-promotional content.

In fact, publishing content on social media and blogs that is entirely self-promotional is one of the quickest ways to cut down your online reputation, and send people running from your blog, enewsletter or .  If you want to build a well-followed business presence, or warm campfire, then you need to dial back the sales pitch and self promotion and focus on giving value to your community and clients.  The reason for this is simple.  No one cares about you.  That isn’t why they read your blog.  They care about how you can help them or add value to their lives.

Be yourself, be positive and be interesting.  

Be comfortable that you are who you are. The more you that you show yourself, the more people are likely to be able to relate to you.   Keep your communications positive and interesting and be someone that people can learn something from, or take away and idea from.  And don’t worry about people stealing your ideas.  Ideas are meant to be used, shared and improved upon by others!

Make time but don’t waste time

Social Marketing and community building takes time to setup, and get up and running, but once it is working well, with good processes in place for subscribing new contacts, responding to comments, updating your statuses and distributing your content, all you need to do is interact a little, every week.  A good social media presence can take less than 30 minutes per week to maintain.  And remember to share ideas other than your own … it shows you read and appreciate others.

Suck it up

Read widely.  Suck up other people’s ideas, blend them, amalgamate them, learn from them and use them to create new ones. Be a part of other people’s communities… not just your own.  Comment, ask, listen and respond to other people’s thought leadership and learn from it.

Many of the businesses we are working with are building their campfires actively the moment.  They are carefully crafting their blogs, articles and events, forming up lists of people in their community that they want to invite into the warmth of their campfire and drive conversation with. They are exploring their own opinions, and considering what their communities could really find value in.

Some remain unsure of what they want the warmth for, but feel sure that warmth is better than cold in a competitive economy.  I remind them that this is only the beginning of the social era.  These new communications channels will become more and more important over time, and without them we are stuck in the cold.

How is your business working to achieve greater warmth in their marketing?

Image source: flickr.com fritzmb

Resistance surrounds us. Resistance to progress, resistance to taking a risk, and resistance to making the time to make something happen.

But it can be overcome.  It must be overcome if we are going to ship truly successful outcomes in our businesses.

“The resistance” is a term first coined by Steven Pressfield and later, Seth Godin as a way to describe our natural, prehistoric fear of failure, fear of people noticing us, and fear of risk.  It is perfectly natural to fear failure and resist taking steps at the forefront of the market that might lead us there; but it is also an instinct that we MUST, above all, squash in our businesses if we are going to make success creating progress, or to grow in a fast moving Internet driven era.

The resistance is the entirely natural human reaction we have to strong ideas in a meeting.  Reactions that make us want to slow a process down, grind an idea to a halt, or slide someone making strong progress back into “go slow” rather than help them move forward.

Resistance is poisonous to turning a new ideas into a product and taking it out to market or offering a new service.

In professional services firms, companies delay pushing out a piece of marketing in an effort to ensure it is perfect.  They examine a client communication until they have absolutely assured themselves that it will not do them any damage.  They hold back a new product or service for fear they will get it wrong…

So often firms examine an opportunity for so long it becomes old, irrelevant or unimportant.  They let a good idea go by without response or encouragement, or a client opportunity slide past without following it up or doing anything about it.  And the instinct that causes it is primal.

According to Seth Godin in his book Linchpin this instinct of resistance is borne from the instincts we needed to survive in prehistoric times.  It is the “lizard brain” that we attribute to much less intelligent reptiles, driving our survival, or in modern days our fear of failure, scrutiny and criticism.  It drives our instinct to breed, our instinct to feed, and our instinct to stay safe, and work in routines.

So how do we overcome it?

How do we stop resistance from crippling us at the point of greatest opportunity and also greatest risk?  We must block it out…

1.  Take ourselves out of environments of resistance:

• Resist being in meetings that delay our ability to meet deadlines and discourage ideas;
• Resist delaying deadlines.  Full stop.
• Resist constantly deprioritizing the things that we fear most that we know could achieve the most.

2.  And commit … Commit to shipping outcomes…

• real outcomes,
• real communications,
• real marketing,
• real action.

Ship them quickly and refine them on the run.  Ship mediocre marketing if you must, but ship something…

If you ship nothing then you may as well have never had an idea to begin with.

And if you still need inspiration, watch this video by Seth Godin “Quieting the Lizard Brain”.

* Image above from Anne McCrossan.

A proactive business can survive, grow and even call themselves successful from an opportunistic approach to market.  But a strategically considered, well targeted approach can deliver so much more.

Put metaphorically, an orange tree planted in the ground will probably grow and bear fruit, but one in a structured bed, planted in the right location, with the right fertilizer will yield more fruit for longer periods.

Sure, most businesses achieve a level of organic, accidental growth.  Right place, right time, right service…

They can be enough to build a very exciting company.  But once you have this in place, and you are looking for the next level of growth, what needs to be done is different. Fundamentally different.

The best and most compounding growth comes from the active pursuit of business relationships in well considered, well understood target markets, ripe with early opportunity.

Sure, it comes from building a brand that is well recognized by buyers, targets and industry influencers; but more importantly it comes from identifying problems, gaps and opportunities in a segment and being able to deliberately connect your people with the people you want to work with.

There is no rocket science to building a marketing strategy for a professional services firm.  A good approach to strategic marketing requires strategy, but it also needs to be implementable, rooted in growing the business it serves.  The best strategies:

1.  Have a well understood, well segmented market view, where the opportunities, gaps and trends are researched, explored and extrapolated so that prospects can be identified and openings sought.  A company with strategic vision can see new markets early enough to properly capitalize on an opportunity.  A company that doesn’t, jumps on a trend once it is well underway, mature even, missing the best profits.

All too often businesses take crude, unvalidated, or even ignorant views of their market as satisfactory baselines for business decision making.   It just is not strategic.

2.  Profile specifically opportune target markets, and specific corporate and “people” targets within them.  In services industries, even in the age of i-mania, the cliché still stands true. ‘People do business with people’.  So once we have identified the strategic opportunities, we need to identify your target clients, then identify the target persons within your target clients that you need to build trust, rapport and relationships with to attract their business.  If you know who you want to do business with, it is a lot easier to craft a marketing program that will connect with them, their problems, opportunities and environment.

3.  Build an implementable strategy.  If you truly understand your market you will now be able to compile a tactical approach to it, tailoring your services and marketing them to those that you want to have buy them.     Your message, communication and implementation should draw at every step on your understanding of the problems in your target markets.  You must demonstrate the creative ways your firm can solve them, and the risks that might emerge.  Your knowledge allows you to step strategically into the emerging, opportune and exciting spaces in your market.

The alternative is to lag with declining revenue growth at the rear of trends, opportunistically grabbing onto whatever business lands in front of your pipeline.  It can work, but it can be better.

A truly strategic marketing plan is simple, realistic and implementable by the team that will grow from its success.  It draws marketing and business development together and drives revenue and profit deliberately.

Is your marketing plan strategic enough?   

Many of us who work in marketing industry, or marketing of our own businesses have been subtly adjusting the way we do things for a while.  But how many of us have stopped and really “thought about” the enormous shift that has occurred in how to market a services (or even a product) business? 

Two, three, four or five years ago, we used to market a business purely by interrupting people.  We interrupted people by advertising in their path and hoped to disrupt them from what they were doing with a loud enough message that it sunk into their heads.

We advertised in newspapers to interrupt them while they were reading the paper.  We disrupted their TV viewing with advertising promoting a bargain, sale, or call to action.  We dumped junk mail in letterboxes to disrupt people when they read their mail, and we used to cold call and spam email people in the hope that they would suddenly leap to the attention of our business.

This is old marketing, ‘Outbound marketing’ trying to force someone to do something with no real consideration of product or pipeline.  It was marketing focused on finding customers like needles in haystacks.

Today, things are different.   We and our clients’ are working our hardest to do a different kind of marketing:  Marketing that attracts highly qualified clients to our business like a magnet, ‘Inbound Marketing’.  Marketing that does much of the early sales work for us.

Instead of interrupting people with marketing and promotion, our primary tactics are built around making ourselves interesting to our target markets and providing valuable information that people want to see and look forward to interacting with.  We let people choose to interact with us when they need us, and we ensure they know we exist by being an active part of their online and offline communities.

Instead of cold calling we create useful content and tools so a prospect contacts us looking for more information.  Instead of beating people over the head with our advertising, we create articles (blogs,) and videos that people want to read and offer them through our connected social networks.  And we work hard to improve our search engine optimization so that the people in our community can find and validate our capability with a few online clicks when we are referred by our peers or other customers.  Community, content and social media become the key to our success.

Think about how your services business is marketing itself.  Are your primary tactics still built around interrupting people, or are you starting to build community, content and engagement around your business, allowing them to choose you as a service provider for the value you offer? 

Do you find it hard or uncomfortable coming up with things to post on LinkedIn?

You are not alone. Many of our clients and colleagues have been getting more active on LinkedIn of late, and are continually asking us what they should be posting online. So we’ve put together a list of ideas that you can use as a guide for what you should and shouldn’t post on LinkedIn.

Things you should post on or do on LinkedIn include:

Share links (using a URL shortener like bit.ly) to interesting articles, websites or video you have found that some individuals in your network might appreciate. Don’t worry about whether all of your connections will find the information equally valuable. Also, try to use words that grab the readers and encourage them to click the link.

Pose a question that could lead to solving a problem you have, like: “Anyone know any good graphic designers?”

Conduct an informal poll of your network relating to a topic that is of interest to you, such as: “What tools are you using to deliver online content to your clients?“

Mention a person or a situation that might be helpful to some of your connections, like: “I just met with John Jeffrey from ABC Engineers and found out they are saving companies lots of $$ on building services design.“

Talk about an event you are attending or have attended to encourage involvement and/or questions

Use the “Like” feature when you see a helpful update from one of your connections. Doing this shares that update with your entire network. This is a great way to give the writer of the helpful update exposure to your network.

Comment on other people’s posts. Giving your community feedback “engages” with them, which is one of the core purposes for social media usage.

And, just as importantly, following is a list of “No-Nos” and netiquette you should observe on LinkedIn.

Don’t Use LinkedIn Like Facebook and Twitter  – The netiquette on LinkedIn is no more than a couple of updates per week (max one-two per day), whereas on Twitter you are almost expected to tweet twenty times per day.

Please disconnect your Twitter feed from your LinkedIn Updates (or don’t connect them in the first place) – Usage of LinkedIn and Twitter is different… Active Twitter feeds on LinkedIn pollute other’s updates with more personal commentary than might normally be appropriate for LinkedIn.

Don’t mention personal things – like what you had for breakfast or that your cat, dog or child is sick today – this is inappropriate. It suggests to the business professionals in your network that you don’t really respect their time.

Don’t flog – Continually talking about specific products and services make people think you are trying to flog something. This is not the purpose of social media, especially LinkedIn.

Avoid talking about topics that might be sensitive or inappropriate to some of your audience. [if your mother would dislike the comment – don’t make it]

Think twice before posting your physical whereabouts. If you must, do it after you return. Burglaries have occurred after location status tweets.

Don’t waste your time reading updates from people who violate all of the above netiquette rules. By using the “Hide” function, you can stop an individual’s status updates from showing up on your home page.

Don’t hold your breath for a lot of feedback but know people ARE watching you, getting to know more about you.

Want to know more about LinkedIn? We have put together a quick and free “Professional Use of LinkedIn” slideshow you can work through at your own pace.

If you like our article, why not share it with your LinkedIn network?  They might find it as useful as you have.  

No matter how much some want to deny it, people are communicating differently, thinking more selfishly and expecting more.  Clients don’t just want a technically capable service provider anymore, they want a professional service that stays at the cusp.  They  want to be the centre of your universe.  And why shouldn’t they… they are your Clients.

All those delivering services in 2012 will be faced with a series of opportunities… keep doing things the way we always have and hope for the best; or understand what our markets require from our services firms as their positioning shifts and find ways to deliver an evolved service that fulfills the “right now” needs of your target clients.

Here are the most important trends I urge you to address in 2012.  Some of them are marketing, and some of them are more important “market positioning” for your firm:

1.  Look at your markets, understand your current USP

2012 is the time to look at your whole market positioning and decide which parts of the new economy are right to embrace in your professional business and which are irrelevant.  For many businesses the opportunity exists to develop a whole new unique selling proposition (USP), tweak their existing one, or perhaps to consider how you can make your service more valuable and in turn more visible than your competition for the very first time.

Marketing is now no longer an option, it is a mandatory task, but simple self-promotory campaign based marketing just makes you mediocre.  To succeed and really drive growth in 2012, you will have to be more than mediocre at marketing, you are going to need to know exactly where your niche is, because if you don’t your customers simply won’t find you there.

2.  Communicate differently on email

Our marketplace is communicating differently to how they communicated last year or the year before.  There is more email in our inboxes than ever before.  So much of it is noise, offering little or no value, selling not giving, pushing not leading.   But with more than 60% of people reading their emails on mobile devices, on the go, over more than 15 hours in the day, the opportunity to provide quality content via email that positions your firm at the forefront of your market is irresistible.  Please don’t waste the opportunity.

3.  Make your Website work harder for you

Three or four years ago your website was something static… a tool to set and forget.  You built a website, wrote the copy and updated it from time to time with self-promotion.  Now, the website is one of the primary gateways to your business.  It is the first place that someone goes when they find out about your firm, and the best opportunity that you have to lure them in, calling them to action right when they are ready to step up as a service-buyer.  Other than your community, it is the most important tool you have in your kitbag… because it is the hub from which all your other marketing activities can happen… email marketing, advertising, Google adwords, direct mail, social media, referral… all of these tactics lead to your website.  If your website doesn’t have honest, convincing hooks to catch those fish, you are mossing the best opportunity available.

4.  Get Social

Did you know that the fastest growing age-group of social media users in 2011 was those between 55-65?  So many of our sensible, professional clients start out resistant to (or mildly curious about) social media when we work on their first strategy, but when we explain the personal and business benefits of being active in their online communities, most quickly step up for a look and like what they see.

Being an appropriate part of your online communities not only helps you to understand the emerging technologies and communications techniques as they ripple through our markets, it also presents your business as being progressive, inquisitive and active in its marketplace.

But what you really need to understand about social media is this:

• In online communities people group themselves by their interests, technical capability and communities, so you can often find your primary target markets more successfully online than you can offline, and with a carefully constructed campaign, showcase your capability without selling gaudily, flogging your soul or spending a cent (you may have to spend a few hours though).
• As a desirable professional people will “check you out” online long before they ever approach you to provide a professional service.  They judge you on your Linkedin page, your online communities, and the depth of your personal brand.
• You should never, ever entrust your business or personal brand to the youngest or most social person in the room.  Your brands are the most important things you have in professional services.  They take years to build to the level where they attract clients organically. Why would you risk them on someone who doesn’t necessarily understand that one inappropriate update, tweet or comment can do inexorable damage?

5.  Ensure your data is in order

When we communicate with clients in this time poor, message rich world, we want to deliver only the most relevant, valuable information we can, and we want to do it in a timely manner.  So it is important to have living client, target client and influencer lists (or ideally, a well-adopted client relationship management (CRM) system) and the business processes to support it.  You need to have segmented your target clients well, so you can deliver only the most useful information to them, and you can do it fast, while a trend is still a trend, and your news is still news.  Fundamentally, though, the most important thing when building a list, is to build the business processes that ensure people continue to update it and use it.

6.  Understand your pipeline, for next year [not last year]

The winning markets in 2012 may look very different to the winning markets in 2011.  Most experienced business operators understand this.  They know that during an election year Government work will slow for an extended period, and during a global credit crunch only the most capitalized firms will be taking risk.   So where will your active clients come from next year?  Which will be more profitable?  And how many do you need in your pipeline to cover your costs and meet your targets?  How much of this will come from existing clients, and how much from new clients, and now we come back to #1… What is the USP that is going to secure those clients as yours this year?

7.  Evolve your services

Are you providing the services that your target clients need in 2012?  Are you offering them the latest technology, tools and capability, streamlining their spend and driving greater efficiency from their projects?  Are you leveraging and collaborating with your Clients and Partners, using client portals, collaborative project management tools, and communicating as often as they need?  Have you taken the time to look at how you can evolve your services with the changing technology environment and faster web speeds available?  What do your clients need?  What do they want?  How can you ensure you give them everything they need and waste nothing?  2012 is not a year for looking back and considering, it is a year for stepping forward and serving the clients you have, and building the clients you want by giving them want they need and what they want.  2012 is a year of evolution.

If you get on top of all this, you’re ready for a bumper year.   So have have a Merry Christmas and a safe holiday season, and we’ll see you online in 2012.

Warmest Regards, Rebecca and the Stretch Marketing Team. 

I simply booked into similar flights with Virgin and got on with my day on the same route.  But on my trip, I was fortunate to sit next to another inconvenienced traveller, an International Director of one of the world’s larger Engineering firms.  A foreigner, visiting Australia for business, making decisions about where to invest, grow and improve their services firm.   This gentleman said to me…

“They didn’t just hurt their own brand did they… They took another swipe at Brand Australia.” 

At first I curled back in horror and defence of my patriotic Aussie brand,  but when you consider the last twelve months,  from an international perspective he is very, very right.

The Qantas grounding is another blow to the brand of our previously very stable, secure and reliable nation, known for its lack of sovereign risk, stable investment environment, conservative growth-supporting governments, good sports achievements, sunny weather and great beaches, not to mention our previously faultless flying kangaroo.

In the past twelve months our national brand ‘Brand Australia’ has taken a big beating, politically, financially and emotionally.

The Brand Australia website says

“Australia is … well known for its friendly people, spectacular environment, resources and lifestyle. But this is only part of our story. Contemporary Australia is a confident, creative and outward looking nation, with a strong economy and an abundance of talented people.”

And yet, this Qantas grounding caps off a year in which we have had:

• a spate of natural disasters and frightening weather across an enormous percentage of our country,
• a sudden public dumping of our elected Prime Minister,
• a surprise minerals resources rent tax (MRRT) sprung on our strongest and only thriving industry,
• a dollar that has moved so erratically foreigners can no longer afford to contemplate visiting our beaches,
• a hung Parliament,
• a Carbon Tax that was vehemently opposed by some (and that hits that only surviving industry again),
• a loss in the Rugby World Cup
• and now, our national airline, Qantas having to call international grounding to solve their ongoing disputes.

Brand Australia isn’t looking so “friendly” or “outward looking” and we keep trying to take down our “strong economy” from the inside.  Nor is it reflecting the stable, secure, reliable or beautiful values our country has long been known for as we head into 2012.

So, where does Australia’s brand go from here?   Have we lost our mojo?  And what are we going to do to get it back?

At least Sam Stosur and Cadel Evans are keeping our dreams alive.

Tell us what you think…

People know what to expect from a commodity-service, don’t want to pay much for it, and they can pretty-much get it from anyone (think tax returns, basic architecture, contract administration, and some types of engineering).   Businesses bang the services out with little care for relationships leaving the barriers to entry and exit of a client fairly low and complain how price driven their firms are.

A “problem solving service” on the other hand is a little different.

People buy a problem solving service because they believe they “need to solve a problem”.  They identify with a problem that they have right now, or a fear of a problem that they think they will have in the future, and they seek out a solution.    They think they are going to buy a business, so they seek strategic business or legal advice to do due diligence.  They want to develop a property so they seek out a Development Adviser to help them get their feasibility to stack up.  They want to build a structurally complicated project on poor ground so they seek out a Structural Engineer to get the footings and structure right and reduce risk on the owners and builder.

In order to sell to them you have to offer a compelling solution to the problem or need they think they have. You have to stand out from the crowd as unique, valuable or most suitable to solve their problem.  And you need to be constantly evolving your knowledge of problems that need solving in your target industries as the industry change with technology, trends and tools.

But how many service providers actually recognize the problems and needs that they service when they see them in their target audience?  And how many are actively looking for them, in the places they are most likely to find them?

Think about it… What are the needs or problems that your business services?

At Stretch Marketing we service a business’s need to grow organically, building their marketing strategy, teaching their staff how to be core to business development, then leading them in the implementation of their tactical marketing, PR and BD programs.

We built our services around the problems our clients have, like keeping up with changing marketing technologies; driving marketing in a deliberate and strategic manner; getting rhythm in their marketing and communications; and building relationships in their local markets, so we find it easy to achieve solid results.

The most successful consultants are the ones that identify the problems their clients’ have and come up with smarter solutions to them.

If I asked your clients what problems you solve for them what would they say?

Would they tell me that you help them identify their most pressing problems and find the solutions to them as your top priority?

Or would they tell me you deliver a largely commoditized service that offers only the mandatory services available in your category?  Are you an Engineer, or a Project Problem Solver?  An Accountant or an Adviser?  A Leader or a Follower?

Do you, as a key person in a services business, keep yourself and your firm on the cutting edge of your industry’s trends, digesting technology changes, Internet forces and opportunities so your clients don’t have to?

People pay a premium for smarter thinkers, more strategic and proactive insights and an ability to see and solve their problems… but are you offering this problem solving service to your clients? Or are you just wheeling out the same-old same-way approach… banging out a service?

Tell us what problems you solve for your clients… we’d love to hear some examples…

In the professional marketplace you now have the opportunity to present your firm and yourself for exactly how competent, experienced and connected you are, way before you are able to stand in front of someone, and long before you have the opportunity to close a sale.  When someone refers you to a lead, the first thing that person will do is Google or LinkedIn search you, and judge you.  Are you ready?

People can judge you by your ability to present yourself online, as individuals and as a company.  This is increasingly important to the business development process for professionals in a search oriented marketplace.

Think about it…

People can Google you and see how you rank, and how many things you have been noticed for doing in your career, community, and companies.   (And we all Google everything readily these days…)

People can find you on LinkedIn, assess your CV and read testimonials from your associates, contacts and clients to judge your professional competence, (and ability to keep up with technology trends).   They can also see who else you are connected to in your community and determine if you move in similar, or appealing circles.

People can look you up on Facebook and understand the way you build and interact with your online communities.  On Facebook they can see conversations, comments and photos that help them to know your personality better (or not!).

People can follow you on Twitter and understand the short, punchy influential thoughts you choose to share with large and often less-personal groups.

And people can check your Youtube contributions to see business videos, personal video clips, and infographics that you choose to, or find uploaded into the public sphere.

All these things people can look at without your permission or knowledge and make a decision about whether they want to do business with you.  If you don’t make the mark, you might not be granted the time, effort or understanding required to sell your services to someone.

If you haven’t already, I suggest you:
1.    Google yourself, and understand the power of your personal and company brands online right now.
2.    Look up your LinkedIn page, and review your connections and recommendations, and look to get your contacts in your network above 150 or 200 – pretty easy now, even in Australia.
3.    Then set about understanding what you don’t know about online… (chances are that is more than you think).  Allocate some time to learning what you should know about building your personal and business brands online.
4.    Talk to your clients and find out what information you could provide that they would value, or that would help them.  (better to give people information and interaction they value than noise they don’t want to hear).
5.    Seek some help from a credible source (and ideally someone who understands your business and professionalism requirements that is reputable and referred in social media).

BE WARNED….  Many businesses move into the online space by asking the youngest and cheapest in their office to manage it as social media and Internet is seen as a young person’s tool.  They barrel forth broadcasting sales-oriented messages and trying to flog services and products, offering nothing but noise.  This is inappropriate for social media and the Internet, where people expect community, interaction and value that aligns with a firm’s brand and quality.  It is a different style of marketing, so be sure you have considered this before you start and place your brand at risk.

If you are an experienced, active professional that is doing business in the modern economy you are being judged by your presence online.  And the Internet isn’t going away.

Doing nothing is costing you plenty more than doing something will.

If you like this article, and want to know more about our marketing services please visit our website.

I want you to imagine two cats, both hunting the same mouse.  One is a wild cat, scrawny, hungry and merciless in his search for food.   He knows he needs that meal to make it through another day, and he is not going to let it out of his sight.  He likes to eat “mouse”, in fact it is one of his favourite meals, being much better than the crusty 4-day-old sandwich  at the bottom of the rubbish bin, so it is the only thing he can focus on.

The other cat is a plump, well-fed and loved house cat that has just finished a big liver and kidney dinner.  He’s comfortable, content and confident that there will be another meal in his bowl tonight.  For him, the mouse is just entertainment.

Which cat works hardest to catch the mouse?  Which one displays the wholehearted concentration required to hunt, corner and consume his prey?

——

Well, surprise, surprise, it is no different in marketing and business development.  In the economic environment we are in in Queensland and throughout Australia, there are many starved cats hunting hard for a meal in property and construction, government services, architecture, engineering and financial services.   There is also a handful of hungry cats, who are not starving, but rather, looking carefully for the most “choice” meal available.  And inevitably, but less commonly there are the fat cats feeding off secure clients.

In fact, there are three different types of businesses that I see regularly at the moment in the professional services industry:

1. Starving Businesses who need help to survive in this market, and aren’t sure of the best way to hunt, or even where to hunt because the mice have left their building and they don’t have a clear strategy to find new mice.  Some of these businesses are not sure that they want to change their business to find new mice, but frankly, most need to.   (If you think you are one of these, I recommend reading or re-reading “Who Moved My Cheese” by Spencer Johnson as soon as possible).
2. Hungry Businesses that are thriving on success, aggressively hunting their target market (mice) and wanting to be more and more proactive about it.  These businesses are not starving, but they sure are hungry for growth, and they are chasing it mercilessly, looking for new ways to find and secure business, challenging the way they care for and communicate with their clients, developing new IP and looking for different ways to deliver their services in a changing technology environment. These firms are a very attractive service provider to their target markets, because their own success and quality of service makes them attractive.   (If you think you are one of these, I recommend reading “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose”, by Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO)
3. Plump, Comfortable Businesses with a clear growth trajectory, locked-in, high growth clients who need their services to grow their own businesses, a strong staff-base and resilient succession plan.  An urban myth perhaps?  Yes, they do exist, but it is surprisingly easy to slip from plump and comfortable to starving through complacency and the neglect of client relationships.  (If you are one of these… tell us your favourite read in our comments fields below).

Which type of company are you working in?  And as a Staff Member, Manager or Director are you personally behaving like a Hungry Cat, a Starved Cat, or a Plump and Happy Cat within your firm?  Click here to go directly to our blog and leave us your comments.

So, whilst it is downright miserable out there for many outside the mining sector it is not all starvation and misery.  It is important to remember that you don’t need a license to hunt in this market for the clients who have continued activity and business that you really want, you just need to know what they look like and how to reach them, then get on with doing it.

———–

Our next blog will give you a range of tips on how you can hunt more proactively by bringing your marketing and business development activities together in deliberate support of each other.  Sign up for it here, if you aren’t already a subscriber.

If you like this article, and want to know more about our marketing services please visit our website.