Do It! Marketing Blog: Marketing for Smart People™

As a small business marketing coach, I'm often asked about market research. It all comes down to customer intimacy.

Now THAT sounds like a fancy marketing term. It’s definition is simple – the business that knows their customers best WINS.

How do you get to know them?

Move closer to the customer. Live in their world, think about their problems, and think about their clients and prospects. Their families. Their wants, needs, hopes, dreams, opportunities, and challenges.

Think about what they’re up against. Consider what they need the most help with.

What’s the first step? Research. Preparation. Homework.

Industry, regional, business, demographic and consumer news, trends and statistics are now at every business owner’s fingertips on the Internet. Often for free.

If you’re not intelligently researching your target market’s issues, challenges, and pressures, how can you possibly come to them with a credible solution?

Don’t like sitting at the computer all day? An even better idea is to hit the street.

Visit your local clients, talk to your contacts in the fields you serve, get some firsthand information about what’s going on in their world – what are their challenges, perspectives, obstacles, priorities; what are their dreams, their “only- ifs,” and their biggest aspirations?

Is this a lot of work? You bet. Do the majority of small business owners put in this kind of effort? No way. Which is exactly why YOU should be doing it!

And then leave a comment below with your questions, thoughts, and advice on the ideas above.

Are you a DO IT freak? Welcome to the club!! Please use the social media buttons at the top of this post to share it with your network. YOU are a rock star!

Professional speakers, coaches, consultants, and independent professionals should not present themselves as technicians, number- crunchers, or talk about their “techniques, approaches, and methods.”

Newsflash – Your customers and prospects don’t care.

Instead, present yourself as a problem-solver.

For years now, large accounting firms have taken the lead in portraying themselves as "business partners." They know the danger of being viewed as "number crunchers" or “geeks” or... heaven forbid, “consultants.”

Why have they changed their tune?

Simple. Experience shows that today's customers want both solid results PLUS personalized help, guidance and direction. And as a small business owner, YOU are ideally suited for this role!

For many customers, your business can become a one-stop shop, giving customers the benefits of a product expert, service partner, information advisor, strategy planner, and personal guide all rolled into one.

There is another factor here that should not be ignored: It is never in your best interest to be viewed as a commodity. Today, your small business must offer the value of a consultant in order to secure lasting and price-irrelevant relationships.

You must be able to subtly and regularly communicate to every customer: “These are the measurable ways I am enhancing your results.” Do that, and they won’t leave you for a slightly cheaper alternative down the street. And do it consistently, and you’ll develop customers for life.

Every small business has a brand, whether they know it or not. That branding occurs in the minds of your customers, prospects, employees, stakeholders, and community at large. One mistake that’s fairly common in small business is letting the marketplace determine your company’s positioning.

You need to take control of your brand and position yourself in the marketplace. It is your job to shape and fashion the perception that prospects have of you and your firm. If you assume that “everyone knows what our company does,” you're in trouble – big trouble. It is your job to determine, define, brand, present, and then control the way your business is perceived.

Here are a few basic, but very important, elements in controlling perception: What's the message (written and unwritten) conveyed by your business cards, your emails, and your brochures?

Imagine a motivational speaker whose email address ends in @aol.com or a management consultant who hands you a homemade business card with inkjet streaks and those little fringly perforated edges? Not exactly a confidence-builder, right? 

Remember, people want to do business with professional, hassle-free, customer-centric businesses. The image you convey determines how prospects think of you.

When it comes to specific products and services, do you offer options and different levels of service, or a take-it-or-leave-it deal?

More importantly, do you talk about your company and what the company does (inputs) or do you focus on overt benefits to your customers and successful outcomes (results)?

If the client's bottom-line results are not foremost in your discussions, why should customers choose to work with your company? (Hint: work to develop a simple 1-page sales tool for each of your products and services where client results and outcomes – in dollars and cents – are always on page 1!)

How to collect even higher speaking fees by creating alliances with sponsors…

Can you believe that a perfectly simple, marvelous, easy-to- implement marketing idea can be largely ignored by the community of professional speakers?

Can you imagine having an organization with deep pockets of cash promoting your programs at their expense, building your name and fame in markets you want to penetrate?

Can you picture this cash-rich sponsor sending along a logistics person - on the speaking tour they’ve set up for you (Be still, my beating heart!) - to handle all the physical details like room set-up for you.

And, of course, you may as well fantasize your sponsor then doing all the advance publicity to be sure you address a packed house. Well, hold on to your hat because all the above is true. It’s real. It’s happening now for 2 speakers. They are-in alphabetical order-Michael Chatman and Barb Schwarz, CSP. This article is due to their generously revealing how they do it.

What is a sponsor:
A Sponsor is a group, a company, any cash-generating, profit- making entity that can benefit from exposure to your target market. Sponsors need you because they want to market to the same folks you target.

When you work together you create a triple win. The third winner is your target market.

If your target market is schools and their students, logical sponsors include retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers. They get their name and logo on your handouts. They get great PR. They are the good guys. Remember the firms that place soft drink, snack and candy machines in the schools, suppliers of uniforms for school athletic teams. Purveyors of the foods served in the school cafeteria.

I share these insights anecdotally. I do not pretend to have access to any wisdom beyond my own experience. What I say here is true for me. You alone can decide whether it is true for you. And this may not be all there is. It’s simply what I get here and now:

Photographers who do class pictures, school ring vendors. Every entity that makes money from providing equipment, supplies, consumables to the school. If you address sales professionals, cellular phone companies, computer companies, vendors of everything salespeople buy are potential sponsors.

If you speak to real estate agents, title companies, escrow companies, mortgage companies, etc., are appropriate sponsors.

In any industry or trade group that buys from a group of vendors, any member of that group-including vendors presently frozen out by trade custom or long-time habits-is a prospective sponsor of your programs.

Your sponsor, or sponsors, use funds from their advertising or promotion budgets, funds already committed to be spent somewhere, to advertise and promote attendance at your programs.

How do sponsors benefit from promoting you:
Exposure of their products and their company before the program starts through the publicity created by any of the interested parties.

Sponsor can do a Pre-program presentation. You can sometimes, depending on the venue, give Sponsor table top display space in the back of the room. Sometimes you can arrange for sponsor to have a booth. Sponsor name and logo may go on all printed materials, including any tickets, book covers, albums, bumper stickers, your letterhead.

In media interviews you always mention sponsor’s name. Sponsor’s representatives can sit down in front and you can introduce them during program. Sponsor’s customer goodwill and loyalty is enhanced. Sponsor may get more direct business because they sponsored you.

Is there to be signage at this program? Arrange that each sponsor have the exclusive sign for their type product. If sponsor markets a soft drink and refreshments are to be served, you arrange that sponsor is to have exclusive pourage rights with no other soft drink to be made available.

There may be $ generated from your product sales-and you need to agree up front whether you keep all this or whether you revenue-share with sponsor. You can create a database of attendees or of key influencers for later follow-up.

Professional speaker marketing tip

Most professional speakers, consultants, coaches, and solopreneurs have a hard time moving into a niche or declaring a specialty. Most want to attract as much business as possible, so they go for broad marketing across all topics, categories, and industries, trying to attract all audiences for all that they can offer.

If you fall into this trap, your marketing messages get spread so thin that soon, you’re spending more and more time, effort, and money on marketing and getting less and less return. Does this sound familiar?

The truth is that successful experts know who they are – they “move aside” and specialize in a niche. They focus more energy on marketing their “flagship” services to a very specific target market.

Why? Because – unlike Wal-Mart or Citibank, your business can’t be all things to all people. “Move Aside” is about finding your niche, and claiming your expertise in a narrow area of specialty. In plain English, this means you want to become the “Go-To Guy” or “Go-To Gal” for your specific audience – the exact opposite of a “jack-of-all-trades and master of none.”

Perhaps you want to be known as “the consulting firm that knows the insurance industry inside and out” or “the restaurant marketing coach” or “the manufacturing turnaround expert.”

Maybe you want to appeal to corporate executives with an elite image or appeal to family business owners with a homespun image.

The people you speak with will have a very different reaction to these two mental images of your products/services:

• “I think you might be a good fit...”
  
• “Finally! You are exactly who we’ve been looking for!”

Let me give you an example that will make this point very clearly.

In my hometown in suburban Philadelphia, there’s a real company that lists among its services “Carpet Removal, House Cleaning, Odd Jobs, Catering.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I want a caterer, I’m looking for someone who does professional catering all the time. I don’t want to have to worry about “Did they wash their hands after the carpet removal job and before serving the guests at my daughter’s wedding?”

In fact, even among “serious” catering companies (the ones that don’t do carpet removal) if I’m looking for a caterer for a wedding, I’ll probably be drawn to “Wedding Bells Catering” much more so than “Sam’s Catering” or “Good Eats Catering.” In today’s marketplace, specialists rule.

Create your own special niche. Developing a specialty can go a long way to attracting more substantial clients. Being known as the “experts” in a particular field gives you the opportunity to stand out from the crowd. This is the edge that will tend to draw prospective clients to you. The bottom line: more speaking gigs, more consulting offers, more coaching clients, more revenue, more referrals, and taken together, just a whole lot more fun in running your professional practice.

The fact is that the marketplace values clarity, focus, and direction.

Once you become known for being great at one thing, your company can spread its wings and start to attract more business across the board through a powerful “Halo effect.” If you get known over time for being great at one thing, in the future, people will begin to naturally assume you’re great in a variety of other ways, too. However, if you try to say you’re great at everything on Day 1, nobody will believe you!

The only way to know if this will work for your business is to try it! You’ll be pleased with the speed and magnitude of the results.

What do you think? What's YOUR success story with moving aside? Agree? Disagree? Please use the COMMENTS area below to jump into the conversation...

My advice for both emerging and experienced professional speakers is to "invest in the relationship" with meeting planners and conference producers. What do I mean by that and why is it important for your success?

Invest in the relationship with meeting planners means it’s not always about the money. Most good conference producers and meeting planners consider themselves in the speaker marketing business, the speaker visibility business, the speaker credibility business. When I spent a year working "on the other side of the desk," I was thrilled to work with some incredibly accomplished and successful speakers – CSP’s, CPAE’s – because they SAW that fact.

The company I worked with had 350,000 subscribers and sent out over 10 million emails a month. If you were one of my speakers, that’s the scope and scale of reach you got from us. Your topic, your credentials, your website. 700,000 eyeballs. Do the math. (And see my note at the end of this post if you'd like to get in on this yourself!)

Today, as a speaker marketing coach, many of my professional speaker clients ask me "How do I establish visibility and credibility with my target market?" THIS is precisely one of the best ways!!

Don’t get me wrong – our speakers got paid – but it was a lot less than you might get for a corporate keynote. I know that and you know that. Put your ego in the back seat for a minute. Be willing to invest in the relationship Because if you do a great job the first time, meeting planners and association executives are often in a position to…

a. Raise your base fee

b. Revenue share with you

c. Publish your articles in hardcopy publications, websites, and blogs

d. Publish and distribute your manuals, training guides and e-learning tools

e. Promote you any way they can

For example, I had speakers start doing audio conferences for $500, and then gradually, as the relationship evolved, move up to getting over $40,000 in royalties and revenue share in a single year from our various projects together. On the other hand, if as speakers we ask for all that up front, we won’t get it.

My advice to you at the beginning of any relationship with a meeting planner or event producer is Recognize the marketing/PR value, and let the relationship develop. To adapt a favorite saying, “Do what their audience loves and the money will follow.”

NOTE: You can find a whole lot more of these "information publishing companies" that produce audio conferences, webinars, live events, and niche hardcopy and online newsletters by visiting their professional association, the Specialty Information Publishers Association (SIPA). Perhaps one or more of these companies would make the perfect partner for YOU to expand your thought leadership platform - and get known, get booked, and get slightly famous!

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If you're an emerging or established professional speaker and it's time raise your marketing game, it's not too late to join the Speaker Profit Blueprint program...  everything has been recorded and transcribed for you and our live sessions continue through May 4, 2010. Contact me to see if joining this program might be a fit for your speaking/consulting/coaching business and your specific goals.

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Professional speaker video tips

As a marketing coach for professional speakers, I often share the sound bite "No Video Beats A Bad Video." That simply means you want to get a GREAT professional speaker video. But how?

First, watch lots and lots of them. Go to speakers bureau websites, go to top speakers websites – make a list of what you like and what you don’t like. Then look at where you are in the marketplace and ask “What are MOST of the NEXT level speakers doing in their videos?”

Plan out your professional speaker video carefully – you can actually storyboard it shot by shot using something as simple as index cards or Post-It Notes. When you have a VERY clear idea of exactly what you want viewers to experience and how you want to present yourself professionally, go get it done.

The mistake I see a lot of speakers make (and even some top professional speakers openly admit this) is that they made their demo video too early – before they were educated consumers. They didn’t know what they didn’t know and that made it very hard for them to truly collaborate with their video professional.

Understand that most of your money will go into editing and post-production. Don’t skimp on quality and do get the best professional help you can afford with both the shooting and the editing. Your cousin Vinnie’s $500 camera may be good enough for posting short clips on YouTube, but it’s not good enough to represent your professional work when your livelihood depends on it. Do it once and do it right.

Bonus tip: Many meeting planners like to hear a short audio program before hiring you. Record a high-quality 15 or 20-minute audio program, post it on your website and let planners hear a good opening, some solid content, and a strong close. It’s a great way to get yourself 90% booked before the planner even picks up the phone to call you!

Two more quick tips: 1. Record everything you do and then cut the best stuff together. 2. Getting good visual quality is easy; it’s more important to pay attention to the sound quality of your video – meeting planners WILL watch less-than-ideal video with good sound, they definitely WON’T watch good video with bad or garbled sound.

Bonus from my friend Laurie Brown of Be Great on Camera - Get your free copy of The Top 10 Biggest Mistakes in Making a Video

And if you want a great resource for Professional Speaker Video in the Philadelphia area, you can't go wrong with my own video guru, Rob Kates at www.ProfessionalSpeakerVideo.com

What are your thoughts on how to put together a killer professional speaker video? Please share your opinions in the COMMENTS area below...

For professional speakers, consultants, coaches, independent professionals, and business owners, kickass public relations is often closer than you think.

It does NOT require an expensive PR firm or PR consultant - heck, it doesn't even take an expensive marketing coach - it just takes a simple public relations plan that you can execute yourself on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. 

10 can’t miss PR moves:

1. Write a book and get it published (Self-publishing is great - and get Steve Weber's Plug Your Book to maximize its PR value)
2. Write articles for any periodical, newspaper or magazine- (Contact editors to see what they want – they’re hungry for good content)
3. Produce and distribute your own Audio PPT presentation with voiceover track using Camtasia and share it on Slideshare
4. Stand out - quit looking and sounding like everybody else - have a contrarian perspective, a unique voice, and a strong opinion about your topic, industry, niche, and expertise
5. Speak to any group that will listen to you; the more you speak, the more you speak!
6. Hold a free teleconference and invite clients, prospects, and guests from the media (print, radio, bloggers, etc)
7. Join the organizations that your target customers belong to – and actively participate, offer to be their PR liaison, write their press releases, become the face and voice of that organization
8. Be a smart networker and network daily!!! (Never eat alone!) 
9. No boring business cards - no boring template websites  - no aol or comcast.net email address - LOOK like a credible expert
10. ASK!!!! Help, connections, and introductions are just 1 question away! 
11. (Bonus) Establish REAL relationships with journalists and reporters – they’ll ask YOU for help!
12. (Bonus) Take a giant shortcut by using www.prleads.com - tell owner Dan Janal I sent you
13. (Bonus) Comment on industry-leading blogs with insightful, valuable answers
14. (Bonus) Do NOT ask a marketing speaker or marketing coach who can't count for advice on PR

p.s. If you'd like some personalized help - and your very own customized email and phone outreach tools, social media scripts, a killer email signature file, a polished referral blurb and more, check out the Small Biz Outreach Action Packs.

• If you were to fully live your life, what is the first change you would make?
• What areas of your life could be upgraded or improved?
• What could you start working on today that would make the biggest difference?
• How could you make this goal more specific or measurable?
• What would be the biggest impact from achieving your goal(s)?
• What do you love? How can you bring in more of it?
• What do you hate? How can you eliminate/reduce almost all of it?
  
• What's one thing you would love to do before you die?
• What could you do right now that would really put a smile on your face?
• For your life to be perfect, what would have to change?
• What do you really, really, REALLY want? (Really!!)
• Are you willing to be the hero of your own story?
• What obstacles might stop you?
• Who are your allies? What weapons and tools do you have?
• What - or who - is at hand right now that might hold the key to your success?

The big day is here for iPhone and iPod Touch users: 

The Do It! Marketing app is now available (FREE!)

Good news - it's way cool...

Great news - grab this app and in 60 seconds, you'll get access to some of the best business, marketing, and entrpreneurial minds on the planet including:

• Scott "Hello My Name is Scott" Ginsberg
  
• Chris Brogan
• Seth Godin
  
• MarketingProfs
• Find & Convert
• Bob Bly
• CopyBlogger

...and about two dozen more.

PLUS you can "surf and go" - this app supports offline reading in planes, trains, and tunnels. Once you download the posts, no need to stay connected! Catch up on your marketing smarts even in "Airplane Mode."

Rated "5 stars" by my Mom and "4 paws" by my dog - but you'll love it, too! 

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/marketing-built-by-appmakr-com/id351058116?mt=8

Download it, play with it, and if you're getting some good mojo from it, post a review or a rating - or leave a comment below and let's hear what you think...