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One of the most difficult tasks for small business owners, when it comes to marketing, is organization. Until you start to look at marketing as one of the core systems in your business it will always feel like a disjointed and disconnected thing that you know you must do when you can get around to it. And that’s no way to build momentum.
I find that it’s helpful for many people to look at marketing in the traditional org chart fashion. See, here’s the deal, even if it’s just you and Louie, he does this, you do that, you need an org chart for your business. Here’s why. No matter how many actual people you have in your organization, your business has many functions, it’s just that they are being done - or not being done - by just you and Louie.
By creating an organization chart, and acknowledging all the functions, you stand a far greater chance of developing individual systems and strategies to make sure the work in each area is organized and done. Not to mention the fact that you are laying the foundation for growth if and when you have bodies to put in more of the boxes on your chart.
To keep you org chart simple for now I like to start with the top as Marketing, Money and Management or Marketing, Finance and Operations.
For the purpose of this post I’ve created what I think is the ideal Marketing organization in the graphic below. (This is a smartart graphic that new versions of MS Office can create and save as an image - click on the graphic to see full size and feel free to borrow for your organization.)
If you can begin to realize that your company’s marketing system does indeed need to perform all of the functions listed above, you can more easily grasp how to create processes that assure you are accurately moving each and every customer logically along the path to becoming a hyper-satisfied referral machine.
Jeff Howe is a contributing editor at Wired magazine, where he covers the media and entertainment industry. In June of 2006 he published an article for Wired titled “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.” That article has name grown to become the book - Crowdsourcing.
Jeff is a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast where he shares this concept and discusses how the small business can take advantage of it.
Jeff has two definitions of the term crowdsourcing: 1) The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.
2) The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.
One of my favorite ideas that came out of our discussion is the fact that branding is essentially a form of crowdsourcing.
Below is a video that Jeff created to promote the concept of crowdsourcing.
This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by att.com/onwardsmallbiz. Resources for the small business owner.
Join my live today (Monday, Oct 6th) at Noon CDT for a live conversation with Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham.
Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham, two of Inc. magazine’s hugely popular columnists, will talk about how small-business people can deal with all kinds of tricky business situations. This skill is something they call “The Knack.”
Norm Brodsky, the founder of Citi Storage, is an entrepreneur and a three-time Inc. 500 honoree. He began writing his monthly Inc. column (with Burlingham) in December 1995.
Bo Burlingham is Inc.’s editor at large. He is the coauthor of The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome, and the author of Small Giants.
Headlines aside I find the economic panic and ensuing bailout talk to be a tad dramatic. I’ve got no particular political ax to grind with that statement, I just think people get so caught up in the hype that they chuck reason.
Small business is the economic backbone of America and certainly the path to any economic bailout, yet nobody seems to acknowledge that fact.
While large businesses have lost more than 170,000 jobs over the last six months, small businesses are seeing their employment sector grow. Over 200,000 small business jobs have been created in that time. New data shows a continuation of this trend. Today, ADP released the September ADP National Employment Report® and ADP Small Business Report® which showed small business employment - defined as businesses with fewer than 50 workers – added 28,000 jobs during September.
The world is a far different place from the one that made up the backdrop of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. How small business makes money, who they serve, when and where they work has little to do with the Dow Jones Index - a fatally flawed gauge of just 30 companies.
Forget the Dow and focus on these numbers instead - lead generated, leads converted, average $ per transaction, average number of transactions per customer - and the turnaround will get underway.
As social media and social network sites such as Facebook grow in popularity and utility for business, it’s no wonder that professionals are building businesses around showing other professionals how to get the most bang for their social networking buck.
For a recent episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast I spoke with Mari Smith who has built a following as a relationship marketing specialist and Facebook business coach. We explored many of the ways that business people are finding to connect, engage and actually sell in a social media environment.
I’ve written a great deal in the past about this subject, including my top 10 business applications for Facebook that is one of my most popular posts. This category is not going away and the more people can focus on understanding how to meet marketing objectives through the use of various social media the better.
This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by att.com/onwardsmallbiz. Resources for the small business owner.
As you may know I’ve launched a marketing planning software tool called Marketing Plan Pro powered by Duct Tape Marketing. The approach we took to create this (with the help of Palo Alto Software) was to make it something completely different from anything out there.
As feedback starts coming in, comments like the below make me think that perhaps we accomplished that goal.
“I love the perspective you’ve added to this software. It’s new, simple, convincing and, most of all, fun. I’ve been working on marketing for the last 15 years and I can tell you that the classic way of developing a marketing plan is really a bore.” ~ Javier G Longo
Go check it out and get $25 off for being such a great Duct Tape Marketing reader!
Google, Yahoo and MSNLive are just itching to get to know more about your website and they are steadily adding tools to make it easier for you to tell them more, learn more and analyze just what’s going on in their world when it comes to your websites.
Time was when figuring out how to get your site listed by the search engines was a mysterious sort of witchcraft (or at least that what some folks wanted you believe.) The search engines want to return the best results they possibly can when people use their engines so it just makes sense for them to make it easier for your content to go through the indexing process as a possible candidate for search engine results.
Google’s newly updated submit center ties together many of the ways you might submit content to Google.
Go visit and consume the content on the following sites and you will gain a great education on how and why to focus more attention on organic search results.
The Webmaster tools - each of these sites has tools that allow you to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your site, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your sites.
Voted a Forbes Favorite for small business and marketing. "Clever marketing ideas galore and lots of contrarian thinking on what works and what doesn't."
This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by 
