By Tannette Johnson-Elie

We’re in prime wedding season with June and July being the biggest months for nuptials. If you’re in the love business, you’re probably wondering how you can capture a bigger slice of the massive wedding market.

Weddings are a glamorous and exciting business, but like a frazzled bride the industry can have its economic ups and downs. Nevertheless, with sweat equity, creativity and ingenuity, it is possible to succeed in the wedding business.

This is a great time to be a wedding entrepreneur. The wedding industry has grown to a $40-billion-dollar-a-year empire, and the average American wedding costs just under $30,000, according to a recent survey by TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com.

Brides are willing to spend more on weddings, despite the economy. Today, more than half of weddings that take place now employ the services of a wedding consultant.

That’s good news for wedding entrepreneurs because it means the industry is rebounding after a recessionary economy. If you’re well-organized, creative and driven and have the patience to deal with brides who can be demanding, then wedding planning may be the right business for you.

Not sure where to start? Well, here’s some advice from two highly successful wedding pros:

Plan to Wear Many Hats

Planning and executing one of life’s most important milestones can be fun and exciting, but ensuring that the big day goes smoothly can be quite a juggling act, according to Denise Bonds, owner of Windermere Elegant Weddings, a Chicago-area wedding-consulting and event-planning business.

An independent wedding planner often must bring together all of the required vendors to successfully pull off the wedding, including the caterer, musicians, the ceremony official, photographer and more. In addition, one must wear many hats in the business.

“You are the bookkeeper, the marketing person, the answering service and the clean-up person,” says Bonds. “You have to stay on top of everything to keep things going.”

Bonds has owned and operated Windermere Elegant Weddings for seven years and has more than 15 years’ experience in the wedding-planning business. A former teacher, Bonds started planning weddings as a hobby for friends. She decided to launch her own business after a couple paid her a handsome sum to coordinate their wedding.

“The groom handed me a large check. That’s when I realized that I can make money at this,” Bonds said. “The planning part of the business is fun, but I love seeing it all come together. The most rewarding thing is to see a wedding turn into a marriage.”

She has not looked back since. Today, Bonds has an impressive roster of clients that include NFL players, top executives, political figures and even President Obama, for whom Bonds coordinated a fundraiser.

Networking and aggressive marketing, including tapping into social media, have been instrumental in the growth of Bonds’ wedding planning business.

“I have to get out there and network. It’s important to get noticed,” she said.  I also have a Facebook business page and I use Pinterest and Instagram. Today’s brides are looking online to find you.”

Find an Overlooked Segment of the Market

Consider Chris Easter. He started TheManRegistry.com in 2008 and it now has become one of the leading online gift sites for grooms. Easter became inspired to start his company after noticing a void in gift options for grooms while shopping for his soon-to-be brother-in-law.

“There wasn’t anything as far as barbecue grills, tools and tech gifts,” said Easter who is based in Los Angeles. “We researched the idea and decided to take the idea of everything the bride would want to know and create a website for grooms.”

Within two year of launching TheManRegistry.com, Easter saw his profits increase by 300% and new registrants to his site grow by 75%.  Easter believes the reason his site has taken off is that it targets a segment of the market that largely has been overlooked – grooms.

“A lot of people see this industry as a gold mine. They think it’s going to be fairly easy to make money,” Easter said. “You have to know the business. You also have to have an angle.’

Although it’s important to have an angle, wedding entrepreneurs must also diversify their services for continued success, Easter said.

“When the volume of weddings goes down, you have to be creative to sustain your business during the peaks and valleys of the year,” Easter said. “We have branded ourselves as a general gift business for men. It’s a whole secondary part of the business that’s just icing on the cake.”

Work Creatively within Client Budgets

One final key piece of advice from Bonds and Easter: listen to your clients and respond accordingly.

“It’s important when the person says to me, ‘I really want this wedding, but how can I make this work within my budget?’ It’s my responsibility to let you know how you can stay within your budget by changing some things,” said Bonds.  “Maybe you can’t afford a horse and carriage, but you might use a horse and carriage as a backdrop for your pictures.”

By Karen Geier

It’s an unfortunate fact that many companies don’t think about press or bloggers until the very end of a product or service push. Often, a company will spend 6-12 months on a flagship product they want to announce, only to engage a PR firm at the last minute, hoping to “push the story out to the media.”

This isn’t how the media (which includes influential bloggers) operates any more, and to follow this model is at your own peril.

At the beginning of the blogging movement, there were a few passionate individuals who owned most of the influence, and were trying to play with the “legitimate media” so they were more interested in press releases and “exclusives” when they were approached. Now, bloggers are a million-headed hydra for every vertical, and they can wield their clout with caprice, because they have built a strong audience who trusts them.

The ABRs of Blog and Press Relations: Always Be Reaching Out

The new press paradigm means that you will have to be focused throughout the year on finding and starting up new relationships with bloggers and press. Set up a Google Reader with topics directly tied to your vertical or industry. Consider using a content service like Prismatic to show you new posts, sites, and blogs on topics that are important to your business.

Find bloggers and journalists you’d like to do business with and when you don’t actually need them, comment on their posts or reach out to discuss an article you like with them. Don’t make this a business-style hard sell. Show appreciation in a short and sweet message, and move on.

As your relationship progresses, you can ask these bloggers and journalists deeper questions. Without getting personal, ask them their opinion on other companies’ strategic moves (make this topical, so it doesn’t seem like espionage).

Try to meet up with some of your press contacts if you are attending the same conferences. Just putting a face to a name and having an off-the-cuff conversation can help solidify your relationships with bloggers.

Once you’ve got a level of comfort and a regular pattern of reaching out to bloggers, send them advance news for your company. They might pick it up, or they might not, but the gesture will not go unnoticed.

Make Your News Newsworthy

Just because your marketing team is really impressed with the project you’ve worked on doesn’t mean it’s news. In order for your item to get picked up by the press or bloggers, you need to make sure it has a hook, and that you’ve tailored your hook to your audience. This means including a personalised introduction, and a unique slant on the story that’s relevant to their beat.

This might seem like a lot of work, but as far as penetration of your story goes, six independently themed stories about your product are better than 12 rewordings of your press release. These articles will automatically be more informative and persuasive, because you will be able to capture nuance and unique features that your two-page, high-level press release can’t.

How to Aggravate Bloggers

Remember, bloggers are passionately dedicated to two things: their subject matter, and their community. If your news fits in with both, you’re in. However, just because you scored a home run the first time, doesn’t mean you can go back to the well if you’re not observing the correct etiquette. To help you not make mistakes, here’s how not to irritate bloggers:

• Don’t only e-mail them when you need something, or if you need something in an emergency. Being a blogger or journalist is a very time-consuming role. Bloggers need to filter their inboxes for what is immediately urgent TO THEM or THEIR READERS. After reading pitches for two hours in the morning, when they finally get to yours, and, without any other contact, you are begging them to cover you, they are most likely going to think: “Why should I care? I already covered these guys. I’ve got 16 other posts to make today, and I don’t have enough time to add one.” Your story will be rejected.

• Don’t send them something you’re sending EVERYBODY ELSE at the same time as everybody else.  When I started my career, there used to be a specific order you had to break tech news in so that you made certain bloggers were happy that they were getting the news first, and they would be indexed by Google as breaking said news. The landscape is a lot more diverse and fragmented, so it’s not as crucial to hit “the right bloggers” first, (because the only right bloggers are the ones appropriate for your brand, and who you have cultivated great relationships with.) but you’ll still need to make sure the bloggers you have the best relationship with are on the priority list for receiving your company’s news first. If you have a deep relationship with a blogger, you can even leak tidbits about your company to get some preferential press.

• Don’t ask them for introductions to their competitors or for intel on their competitors unless you know them well. Bloggers in the same vertical do typically know each other, but if you get turned down for coverage by one blogger, it’s not OK to ask them to help you reach another blogger. This happens a surprising amount, and it never goes over well with bloggers. The general consensus, when faced with these questions is “why should I help someone who isn’t interested in me, or in creating a relationship with my colleague? Blogger relationships take time, and respect. Respect your bloggers enough not to ask them to do your work for you. Do not ask bloggers for anything untoward, either, unless you want your e-mails posted and your brand to be ridiculed. Bloggers build trust with their audiences and try to maintain professional distance from all of the companies they cover. Don’t ask them for scoop.

• Don’t ask for corrections unless there is something fundamentally factually inaccurate. In the world of the semantic web, there is hubris among social media users, and by extension, companies who use said media that they can somehow control the message. This is categorically not true. Yet, brands still attempt (regularly) to correct bloggers on articles they have written. Keep in mind what bloggers are writing are their own opinions, and it’s their prerogative whether they cover you, and what shape that coverage takes. If you have been doing your homework, and building your relationships, your chances of getting negative coverage is minimal. Remember that bloggers write these articles because they are passionate about a topic. Unless there are factual errors in their piece, (which you can have corrected with a short note indicating the error, with supporting proof), don’t ask for changes or “tweaks” to what has been written. This is as insulting as asking to watch a chef cook your steak for you at a restaurant. Don’t ask, because your asking might become the story, and you will get way worse press than you started out to correct.

So, what can you do to ensure success when you do launch, and you need to pitch press?

Must Dos

• Prioritise your list: Make sure the closest connections with great reach get the news first. This helps further your relationships with key allies

• Make personalised pitches that aren’t all business: Most people appreciate genuine connections and conversations. Make sure your pitch is tailored to your connection, and includes enough non-business content (jokes, comments about sports teams, etc.) to make them receptive to what you’re pitching. EVERYONE likes to be asked about themselves or their opinion on something newsworthy.

• Send your contacts a thank you note, and reciprocate post-launch: Thanking a friend for something is a must in your social life, and thanking business partners for their help/encouragement/contribution should be too. Do not take this as an open invitation to send bags of swag to your bloggers to “thank” them for a positive article. That is transparent and insulting. Instead, a quick note thanking your bloggers for the coverage, plus some sort of reciprocation when they aren’t expecting it is your best bet to make the correct impression.

Blogger Outreach isn’t a tick box on a list of launch activities. It is a year round, time consuming, but essential part of business and requires a high level of attention to detail to the etiquette of business relationships. The more energy you put into building and maintaining these relationships, the better your coverage will be.

By Mark Evans

When your company is growing, you have more opportunities to move people up the ladder. In theory, this is a feel-good opportunity for business owners.

In reality, however, promotions are a minefield. You need to promote the right person and offer the right training. You need to deal with the other disgruntled staffers who didn’t get the job. Here are some suggestions for getting it right:

Develop job descriptions. When you have a high-ranking position come open, know precisely what you’re looking for and let your team know. If you need management skills as well as technical ones, let it be known that’s what you’re looking for and objectively follow your own list of attributes when hiring.

A promotion is not a reward. If someone is a great salesperson or programmer, great. Reward that person for a job well done. But hiking them up the ladder for great work doesn’t always work: is that person truly a fit for the new job? The same goes for a staff member who is not thriving or is undergoing personal problems. A new job will probably not solve their woes and may cause more for your company.

Offer feedback. For those who do not get the job, offer honest but respectful feedback. If you’ve been clear about the job, it’ll be easier to explain why a certain person does not have the exact skill set needed to get the promotion. Make this a private conversation and offer suggestions for training opportunities if this person wants to move up in future.

Accept a “no.” Some staffers will reject promotions — often for good reason. Strong team members will know their limits and may want to avoid management jobs and the added hours and stress they bring. Meanwhile, the “no” could be for more personal reasons that they don’t disclose (and privacy laws dictate they don’t need to). Respect that person’s decision and support them in their existing job with no resentment.

Ease the transition. For the person you promote, some equals will suddenly become subordinates. There may be new management responsibilities. Offer support to help this person learn how to deal with changing roles and the new skills they’ll need to thrive in the new job.

Consider banishing titles. If you are running a small shop where everyone is pitching in, perhaps you don’t even need traditional job titles. You can give people increased responsibilities and raises without needing to adjust what they’re called. It can reduce tension at work and keep your team focused on where it should: the work and the overall success of projects and the company.

By Tannette Johnson-Elie

Customer service is the lifeblood of every business, but keeping customers satisfied is harder than ever these days as consumers collectively can make or break a company based on what they tweet or post online.

Today’s Customers Share their Experiences Online

A recent study by Dimensional Research and Zendesk found that 95% of consumers regularly share bad customer service experiences with others and additional research shows they are more likely to share their customer service experiences on social networks like Facebook and Twitter and write online reviews.

“Customer service is more important today than ever before,” says Rieva Lesonsky, founder and CEO of GrowBiz Media and a widely recognized small-business expert. “In this uber-connected world, where one complaint on social media can go viral in an instant, small business owners need to make sure their customers are happy.”

Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs Have an Advantage

When it comes to customer service, small business owners and entrepreneurs have an advantage because they can get to know customers much more intimately than their larger rivals and consequently, can add a personal touch that builds consumers’ trust.

For the little guy, customer service can be a powerful differentiator in a fiercely competitive marketplace, says Bary Moltz, a small business expert, speaker and author based in Chicago.

“Customer service now is the new marketing,” says Moltz, who has decades of experience running his own business ventures. “Customer service forms relationships with people, and people buy from those they know and trust.”

So what does it take to deliver good customer service at a time when consumers are more fed up with bad service and are more likely to complain about it online?

To answer that question, I turned to a couple of small businesses that have it down to a science.

You might say they are masters of customer service.

Personalized Service Goes a Long Way

At Form & Fitness, a personal training studio in Mequon, Wisconsin, each workout is tailor made to fit customer’s needs on a personal level. The first workout session is free and customers are asked about their health history and fitness needs. Going forward, each workout is documented to ensure it is on track with their goals.

“We have an awesome team that’s good at identifying people’s needs,” says Jeff Metzger, manager of Form & Fitness. “Each client is unique and they want something different. In this business, you can’t treat everyone the same.”

But the variety in workouts and the personalized training isn’t the only thing that keeps customers happy at Form & Fitness; many people come back for the camaraderie and the cozy atmosphere at the intimate, 4000-square-foot personal training studio.

“We’ve had the same customers for 10 years. When you walk through our doors here, you feel like you’re at home. The good thing is we don’t have the large crowds that you find at other larger studios.”

Attend to the Details

Julie Brugioni, president and owner of The Silk Thumb Ltd., strives to provide the best personalized service to her customers. Located in Highland Park, Illinois, The Silk Thumb specializes in silk floral arrangements and plants and trees for homes and businesses.

“When delivering an arrangement to a residence or installing trees for a corporation, I am there and making sure that everything looks perfect,” said Brugioni. “My personalized attention doesn’t end after the transaction. You will see me, the owner, carrying trees, getting on my knees stuffing pots with moss and lifting bags of rocks for outdoor planters.

Brugioni has worked in the 32-year-old business off-and-on since she was 16. She purchased The Silk Thumb from the previous owner six years ago. Today, she takes pride in the business she has been a part of for so long, which is demonstrated by the way she treats her customers.

“I love what I do and it is a joy for me to work with our customers,” she said. “I think they see my passion, our talent and beautiful products and that is why they continue to come back.”

Combine In-Store Service with Social Media Presence

Moltz and other small business experts believe that delivering good customer service today requires a combination of personalized service as exemplified by Brugioni and Metzger, coupled with new skills and tools that might include a social media presence, a company blog and a YouTube channel.

In a marketplace where consumers now wield more power than ever, it’s important that small business owners and entrepreneurs engage with customers as much as possible, says Moltz.

““Listen to what your customers are telling you without being defensive,” says Moltz. “Any feedback or complaint from a customer is really a gift.”

Beneath all the noise in a connected, online world, what do customers really want?

“They want a business to respond to their complaints quickly and they want the person they talk with to be pleasant.”

By Mark Evans

As the weather warms up, your employees will likely start talking about their summer plans. But are you ready? You need a solid vacation policy that ensures your business will be covered throughout the year and, at the same time, keeps your team happy.

Know the rules

Each state or province has its own laws about vacation time. But most require employers to offer two weeks of holidays to staff members who have been with a company for a year. You can actually offer more time to your team, if you like, and when an employee takes a vacation is up to the discretion of the employer. Be sure you know the rules and that your policy complies.

Ask for notice

Your vacation policy should require at least 30 days notice from employees. But for summer holidays, you may want to ask for all requests to be in by a certain date in the spring so everyone can book their trips and you can map out the season all at once. It won’t be easy, but you may have to say no to some requests; you need to be sure the business runs smoothly.

Set blackout periods

Most businesses have crunch times. You should consider putting a vacation blackout on these times so you won’t be short staffed. Meanwhile, if you get a rush of requests during the summer, you might need to allow only one week of vacation time for July and August.

Avoid rollovers

If you let staff roll their vacation time into the next year, you could be stuck with requests for lengthy trips from staffers who’ve been stockpiling. Set a reasonable deadline and ask your employees to use it, or lose it.

Be flexible

Set the rules but avoid following them to the letter. If a staff members has a family wedding during a blackout period or needs more than their allotted time away to take an overseas trip, consider bending the rules if it helps keep your team members happy.

Book your own time off

Too many business owners avoid vacationing themselves. Time away is important for your mental health and your family relationships. It can also help you get re-inspired. Plan ahead, delegate your essential tasks to trusted staffers and go!

By Karen Geier

Since the dawn of the semantic web, there has been a paradigm shift in how brands have interacted with consumers. Instead of sending out mass messages and having well-guarded brand offices, brands now have an unprecedented two-way relationship with their customers. But with great access comes new challenges: namely, niche audiences.

There used to be a time when you could cobble together a handful of “personas” to help guide all of your marketing efforts, but the truth is you might be missing entire groups of people who enjoy and recommend your product readily.

Consider Sharpie: long a product used by teachers, celebrities, and office workers, Sharpie discovered that there is a large, dedicated group of tweens and teens online who use their product to draw fake tattoos on themselves. You can see entire galleries of these tattoos here. If Sharpie hadn’t been actively listening online, they wouldn’t have known how many teens use their products regularly, and they wouldn’t have created some of their newest products, which have opened an entirely new revenue stream for them.

Smaller groups of people, united by purpose or necessity, exist online for every product available. It’s your responsibility as a brand to find them, and when you do, make sure you’re talking their language.

Consider for a moment a product that has, for over 100 years, had a niche audience: Mason jars. Mason jars originally had one customer: women who canned food. Now, a quick search on Pinterest reveals that Mason jars have a much more broad appeal, but the people who use them fall into diverse, yet discrete categories such as:

- Environmentalists who prefer the jars to plastic containers

- Interior designers

- DIY enthusiasts

- Cocktail enthusiasts

- Working people who use the jars for lunches

- Crafters

- Moms who use the jars for children’s activities

- Shabby chic wedding planners

- Foodies

All of these groups look at Mason jars in a certain way, and they all use them for different reasons. They also have their own jargon and language that they use when performing these activities. How do you reach them all?

To reach these smaller groups, you need to find them online, and figure out how to tailor your product’s USP to what these consumer groups are looking for. You need to deliver the right story at the right time, in their own language. Here’s how:

1. Do your recon: Perform a search on your product on blog search, Twitter, and Pinterest to see how people use your product. Try to find common connectors to form audience groups. Try to classify these groups, but know that the classifications might change.

2. Dig deeper into these groups: Now that you have rough groups, search again for blogs and content on that specific theme. Try to find out more about what people in each group like: where they shop, what they pin on Pinterest, the most popular blogs and influencers. Make note of the power users on these sites and what they share. Visit their Pinterest and Instagram accounts to see what else these groups are sharing.

3. Discover the trends, and the pain points: While reading the social media footprint of these groups, try to plot out trends, comments and phrases that come up regularly. Also make note of any negative comments about your product, or your vertical in general. Make 2 lists: one is of your customer’s needs, and the other is of the top objections. Connect your brand’s USP to each of these lists. Now you have a master messaging matrix.

4. Reach out to the influencers: Begin relationship-building with influencers, bloggers, top pinners, and more. Comment on their content. Contact them directly to ask them questions. Ask them if they would like to build a partnership with you. Send them free product and ask for their opinion, or their creative input. Add any key learnings into your messaging matrix.

5. Craft targeted, valuable content: Use your messaging matrix to create individual narratives for each group you want to contact. Your narratives shouldn’t be a tough sell. Your branded content should offer real value to the groups in your target audiences. Make some messages topical, and others “evergreen” (can be used at any time of the year). Reach out to your influencers who are interested in you and ask them if they would carry your content on their blogs, or re-post your content from your own sources (Pinterest, Facebook, etc.).

6. Measure your results: Use bitly links and Google Analytics (and a social media monitoring tool) to judge whether your message is getting through. Pinterest even has analytics now that can help you see which content is resonating with your audience. If you notice a particularly strong reaction in one of your groups, consider spending more energy on those groups. If you’re getting zero traction in a group, you can choose to either spend more time on that group, trying to figure out what’s going to hit with them, or you can choose to stop reaching out.

7. Repeat as necessary: Social media marketing may not cost a lot of money, but it does cost time, and as you’re optimising your content and outreach, you need to continue the cycle of figuring out who is using your product, reaching out and making those connections. Be sure to maintain the connections you have already made, too. You never know when you might make a connection that could change your business.

It might seem like broadcasting your message to the widest audience possible will help you find potential customers, but in the age of the semantic web where anyone can have the online experience they customise for themselves, your brand might be leaving serious money and passionate advocates on the table.

Instead of thinking big, think small, and lateral. Simultaneously sending out your message to niche audiences is a great way to get reach online, and to make lasting, passionate connections with customers.

By Aaron Broverman

Even though an average of 130,000 businesses start up in Canada every year, there are even more Canadians who’d like to start their own business, but various fears and trepidations are holding them back.

According to a 2011 Royal Bank of Canada poll, one-third of Canadians (32%) would like to start their own business. In contrast, in the report “Perspectives on Small Business in Canada” by The Canadian Federation of Independent Business, 86% of Canadians disagreed with the statement, “Starting a small business is easy.” Reasons people gave for being hesitant to start their own business include lack of money, (57%) the amount of risk involved, (40%) uncertainty of the success of the business, (36%) and a lack of skills and knowledge (29%).

Three out of the four of these reasons have to do with fear of the unknown, but as Martha Beck life coach Vidica Simpson will tell you, fear can be overcome and she knows exactly how you can do it.

Question Fear

Simpson says the most basic first step in combating any fear is to question it, instead of just taking it at face value and acting on it.

“Question it: is it perceived or is it real?” she asks. “A lot of fears, if not most fears, are perceived. They come from that primitive part of our brain where its sole responsibility is to keep us safe – life or death – and any new thing that we do is automatically perceived as being a threat, which is why questioning is really important.”

Logically, before you can question a fear, you must identify what it is. Like the stats above, it could be fear that you don’t know enough, fear you won’t make enough money or just the universal fear of failure.

“Failure is necessary for growth and learning,” Simpson reminds. “Without failure, how would we know what not to do? Failure shows us what works and what doesn’t work, so fear is important if we take it in the right way.”

Within Your Control?

Once you identify a fear and begin to question it, then you can start doing the real work of parsing out where this fear really comes from and if it’s truly a real thing to be taken seriously or if it’s all in your head.

“Is it in your control to change?” asks Simpson. “If it is, okay. What do you have to do? Do you go back to the drawing board? Do you tweak the product or the service a little bit more? Do you rethink the whole thing? It depends on what your fear tells you.”

If it’s a perceived fear, you’re entering the territory of “What If…?” Yes, of course it could happen, but it might not, and you need to remind yourself that you are well-prepared, you have done your research, you have contingencies in place. If all of this is correct, Simpson says it’s time to go for it, with one thing you should still be aware of in the back of your mind.

“Understand that if something doesn’t work out, you’re simply going to look at why it didn’t and tweak the idea the next time you try it,” she says.

Fear Can Be Good

So, fear can be motivating if used in the right way, but Simpson says that too often people use fear as a way to hold back and not take a risk. Then at some point, they regret not doing it and wonder what might have been.

“The thing with not doing something is, you could play it safe, but you’ll never know whether that would’ve been something really great for you to have done,” says Simpson.

Remember too that you can’t control factors outside of yourself; all that you can control is your reaction to them. In a way, fear is also good because it makes us look inward to assess what’s truly bothering us.

“In looking inward, you will find the answers and be able to trust your gut,” she says. “It’s ‘I’ve done my work, I’ve researched, I’ve prepared versus this was a great idea when I was talking about it, but now I’m not so sure.’”

Simpson cautions that in listening to everyone else and not your inner voice, that’s when you allow the fear to get to you and that’s a decision that will never bring peace.

“We are afraid of things only when we believe that we won’t be able to handle the potential failure,” says Simpson.

“That’s the key. If what you fear is that you won’t be able to survive this thing that might or might not happen, that’s when you’re afraid. But if you go into something trusting yourself, knowing that you’ll be okay no matter what – it might not work out, but that’s okay, you’re not going to die in the process – that’s when you know you can do it.”

By Karen Geier

It was the tweet heard around the world. At the height of the American election in August of last year, Clint Eastwood delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention, where he spoke to an empty chair. Within the hour, the official President Obama Twitter account tweeted a photograph of a chair engraved with “President of the United States” on it, with a simple caption: “This seat’s taken.”

Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, this was a defining moment for social media. Corporate social media accounts are viewed by the public as great to follow for sneak peeks and deals, but there is an understanding that while you may tweet to a friend and get immediate attention, if you tweet to a brand, you might be waiting a while for a response.

This simple act of monitoring, and having a killer response at the ready set President Obama apart, and lent more credence to Real Time Marketing.

Definition

Real Time Marketing is a system of delivering the right message to the right people in the right moment. It tends to involve social media, as that is the quickest way brands can listen to and engage with their audience, but it isn’t always the case. Telling a waitress it’s your friend’s birthday and getting free cake and a song? Real Time Marketing. Visiting a hardware store with a question about your sink, and being sent home with a free washer to fix your leak? Real Time Marketing. The tools may have changed, but the feeling customers get and the loyalty they show is the same. Oreo’s famous Super Bowl blackout tweet was the biggest media hit of the event.

Basic Considerations

Real Time Marketing is a very hard feat to pull off because it is both time and labour intensive and requires a lot of buy-in from a lot of decision makers within the organisation, having creatives on standby, having access to a large library of approved visual and language elements, (and in some cases, answering a lot of questions from legal).

The payoff can be huge, and if your posts do go viral, you can get great brand coverage and fan engagement numbers.

Before you put together a business case for using Real Time Marketing, you need to ensure a few things:

1. Is your brand one that has a touchpoint to a major event? Sometimes, it’s not obvious. You don’t have to have a sports brand to reference the Super Bowl, but it might be hard to reconcile your wrench brand with The Oscars.
2. Do you have enough time to get the necessary team together to work out your action plan for Real Time Marketing an event?
3. Can you assemble all visual assets and building blocks you will need, including approved messaging types, so you can create new work at a moment’s notice?
4. Do you have a goal going into the event? Even though the actual content of your posts will be off-the-cuff, you will need to set up a goal and build a strategy to see that goal through. (For instance, Barack Obama wanted to disrupt the noise surrounding the RNC. The goal was to turn the mentions in his favour, which he did.) Your goal might be to introduce a new line, a new way to use a product, or you might simply want to compete head-to-head with another company in your space.

Getting Started

The most important thing to ensure this type of campaign goes smoothly is to identify the critical people (from art to legal) who need to be on board, and in the room on the day.

Set up a meeting where you agree to exactly how everything is going to work, right down to who is sitting where for maximum efficiency. Discuss with IT which types of collaboration tools you may need to see and approve art, and decide how your social media team will communicate and who will be the ultimate authority on approval. Practice this beforehand if you are worried.

Set goals for what you will define as success. Not every brand will have success like Oreo. Only you can define what success is against your spend.

In the run up to the event, DO YOUR RESEARCH. There are stories you can be talking about. If it’s an awards show, buy every celebrity magazine, and stake out celebrity blogs to find a scoop or an angle for your updates. Have some canned talking points ready to go, so there doesn’t appear to be a large gap in your commentary closer to releasing your Real Time message.

Prepare a list of the hashtags most likely to be in use for your event. Remember, there usually isn’t just one. The Academy Awards hashtags, for instance, are equally #oscars, #academyawards, #oscars2013 and #oscars85.

Once you’ve found a moment, it’s time to execute on your plan. If you’ve done the correct amount of planning you should be able to move swiftly and make lightning-fast decisions. Remember to have 2 people check for spelling, grammar, and tone errors.

Measuring Success

If you’re using a social media analytics tool, you should be able to see the immediate reach of your campaign. Likes, Retweets, Favourites, Facebook shares, replies, and comments are all immediate signs of success. New followers and fans are also an indicator of success.

Don’t discount the days after the event. Keep monitoring your social media channels for a halo effect, and use blog search tools (and Google Alerts) to capture any press mentions of your campaign.

If your update was an image, you can also use Tineye to get a rough count of how many times that image shows up in blogs or websites.

Real Time Marketing isn’t new as a concept, but social media allows brands to send a tailored message out in a way that delights fans and finds new fans due to its network effect lift.

The biggest hurdles to getting your Real Time Marketing campaign off the ground are assembling the stakeholders and establishing the routine for game day.

By Mark Evans

When you’re starting up or launching new products, you’re bound to spend some time pondering the price of your products or services.

And if you’re not devoting a good deal of research and energy to the project, you should. Incorrect pricing can impact sales and the bottom line.

Overall, your prices say a lot about your company, so you need to get it right. Here are some suggestions for coming up with “proper” pricing:

• Look around. See what your competitors are offering to see where your product fits into the scheme of things. Long-standing companies have been testing the market for years and have gone through some trial and error — so use their experience to your own advantage.

• Do the math. Work with your accountant to know the upper and lower end of your pricing range. Be sure you’re not losing money on your lowest possible price and that your prices takes into account likely fluctiations in things like manufacturing materials and fuel.

• Talk to your stakeholders. As you talk to your clients and partners about other issues, bounce price-points off them as well. Find out if they would consider your offering a good value at $100 or $500.

• Understand your market. If you’re offering a premium product or service, keeping your prices high can add to your brand image. But if you’re working in a highly competitive field where clients can easily access another company’s products, you may need to focus on being competitively priced.

• Avoid publishing. On your website and written materials, stay away from publishing any prices, particularly early on. This locks you in. If you decide a few months down the road to make adjustments, you risk offending those who’ve seen the quotes.

• Test. Starting with a “special introductory offer” can help you suss out your price point in the real world. If your new clients laugh at the deal, you know you’ve gone too low. If you get sticker shock reactions, you know you’ve gone too high. But since this was just an introductory price, you are within your rights to make changes when you get to the “real” price.

• Aim high. Consider pricing your items or services on the higher end of what you think the market should bear. You can always lower the price or add more products or services to a bundle over time.

• Avoid excessive discounting. If your prices do end up too high, avoid offering under-the-table deals all the time. If you do, customers will always be pushing for a price reduction, even years down the road. Simply create regulated discounts for bundling, extending service time or other factors, or just drop the price and keep it firm.

It’s an exciting day for all of us at Marketwired. Chief operating officer Jim Delaney has been promoted to CEO, and Michael Nowlan, who has served as CEO for the past 14 years, will remain on the Board of Directors.

Over the past year, Michael worked closely with the Board to ensure a smooth transition. In fact, when Jim was named chief operating officer, he filled a newly created role at Marketwired – one that was established in anticipation of this day. Over the past nine months, Jim and Michael have worked closely together to plan for an orderly, evolutionary change in leadership.

In the coming days, Jim will take to the blog to share more about his priorities with you. In the meantime, we’d invite you to read the release distributed earlier today. You can also join us on Twitter to wish Jim and Michael well in their new roles.