Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

What If Your Customers Could Talk to Your CRM

Fri May 18, 2012

I spend a lot of time talking to and about the stuff that we do to make it work now. So sometimes it’s a real treat to get to talk to someone that’s so far out ahead of most of us in their thinking that you pretty much just listen with your mouth open when they talk. (I would put my conversation with Kevin Kelly in this class)

Recently I had a chance to visit for a bit with one of those folks – Doc Searls. Doc is senior editor for Linux Journal, alumnus fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and co-author of the seminal work – The Cluetrain Manifesto with Rick Levine, Christopher Locke and David Weinberger. (Look for our conversation in a coming episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.)

In 2000, Searls and company painted the road map for what was coming only to have it high jacked to some degree by marketers that misinterpreted the manifesto as a foreshadowing of social media. When Cluetrain told the world that markets are conversations, they meant, I fear, that we as marketers should have an actual conversation and not simply listen and react in ways that tailored our marketing conversations to the research we are now able to obtain via social sharing. (Click on this search for “markets are conversations” and you’ll get an even grimmer sense of this.)

In Searls’ latest work, The Intention Economy, he returns to the notion of conversations but puts the onus and control firmly in the hands of the consumer and not the organization. A great deal of the work that Searls was engaged in at Berkman surrounding the notion of something that’s become known as Vendor Relationship Management or VRM.

The idea of VRM is drawn from the traditional customer relationship language, but shifts the management aspect to the customer instead of the organization. In a VRM environment, the customer controls a great deal of the data and experience and is the determining party in how much or how little is tailored to their wants.

One doesn’t have too look to far out into future space to imagine a technology that enables customer to interact with CRM platforms in a way that allows them to decide what to share, what to update and what to request.

Can you imagine how powerful this type of true conversation could be?

The real hurdle is data trust, or lack of, but I believe we are sitting on a privacy bubble.

So, at what point do we rebel against being used as part of Facebook’s product? At what point do we start to demand the ability to control our own health records? At what point do we tell CVS to shove the little stupid rewards card and start to spend only with those that accept markets are conversations and that relationships are not data.

Enable true intentions in your customer relationships and open your organization to a world of commerce that does not currently exist.

Posted by : John Jantsch on May 18, 2012 | 6:10 am

Categories : Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Strategy

Tags : Cluetrain, CRM, Doc Searls, The Intention Economy, VRM

Who Doesn’t Need Great Free Stuff?

posted by: John Jantsch

Thu May 17, 2012

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Next week is National Small Business Week in the United States and to help celebrate all things small business I’m holding a live webcast where, among other things, I’m going to give a number of lucky participants some awesome business tools like:

A copy of Premise Landing Page Software from Copyblogger
A copy of the Ultimate Marketing System from Duct Tape Marketing
A year access to Live Plan from Palo Alto Software
A year of Spring Metrics Analytics
A year of Nimble CRM
A Pro Membership to Marketing Profs
Tickets to Social Media Explore Events
A bundle of books, iStockphoto credits and more

But, in order to have a chance to win one of these great prizes, you have to attend our small business educational webcast event being held Small Business Week Webcast with John Jantsch Wednesday, May 23rd at 11am CT (http://worldtimebuddy.com to check time zones)

I’m going into a television studio and broadcasting a live streaming video presentation on the very important topic – 5 Ways to Use Online Tools to Drive Offline Sales.

We all know that prospects today do their research online, even if they fully intend to buy a product or service offline. In this session I’ll share some great ways to use the new breed of online tools to drive your prospects into your offline stores, meetings and presentations including:

Online calls to action
O2O Advertising
Networked networking
Local social groups
Online and on the go

Join me for what will prove to be a fun and informative celebration of small business – heck, I might even get my guitar out and sing a bit. (No promises on that one.)

To sign up and reserve your seat for the show – Register Here (While you can’t win any of the prizes unless you attend, we will record the event and provide an archive for all that register.)

I addition, some of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultants are holding local networking and watch events and providing additional education – find a local event near you.

Do you know other small business owners that might need this important information? Why not share this post with all your small business friends?

And a special thanks to our sponsors for support of this event!

Posted by : John Jantsch on May 17, 2012 | 9:32 am

Categories : Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Strategy

Tag : Small Business Week 2012

5 Reasons Why Landing Pages Are a Must

posted by: John Jantsch

Wed May 16, 2012

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Online marketers have used the term “landing page” for many years to describe a sales tactic focused on getting people to take one, specific action. Today, landing pages have simply become a required element in the marketing toolbox for every imaginable business, including local brick and mortar types.

Example of a personalized lead capture landing page

A landing page is just the page people land on because an ad or email directed them to that specific page as opposed to your site’s homepage.

Effective landing pages make it very clear what a visitor is going to get from a page and how to get it. That’s it plain and simple. There are many great articles on how to create better landing pages (including this one from Unbounce) but today I want to focus on why you need to create and use landing pages as a core online tool

Local content

One of the best ways to get your site to rank higher when people search locally and on mobile devices is to have lots of local content. Creating landing pages that feature very localized, down to the neighborhood perhaps, content is a great way to start building the local content and link necessary to have your pages move up in the search index for local search.

Social content

Sending your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook connections to landing pages that are personalized to each network is a great way to deepen the connection. By running Twitter and Facebook feeds on these pages and acknowledging the connection with those that come from those networks you will also find a much higher degree of engagement in those networks.

Smart content

By creating landing pages that address the specific market segments, product segments or key content segments for your business you can begin to better funnel people to the specific types of content they desire. Using a tool like Survey Funnel in conjunction with your landing pages could allow a visitor to tell you what they are looking for and be directed to specific content based on their choices.

Lead capture

Landing pages are your lead capture workhorse. If you have a great eBook or free workshop to promote you may want to create signup forms for most of your web pages, but your signups will soar when you create a page that details, sells and demonstrates the benefits of acquiring your free report. A landing page with video, audio, images, descriptions and very intuitive call to action is a must for lead capture campaigns.

Advertising conversion

Any form of advertising will be much more effective if it is targeted to a page that contains nothing but content that supports the message in your ads. The more relevant the page to the ad, the more effective. Smart marketers constantly experiment with ad and landing page combinations, including creating keyword optimized pages for specific groups of PPC ads.

Get Premise

There are many resources geared towards helping you create landing pages, but my favorite at the moment is Copyblogger’s Premise. I run my entire website on WordPress and Premise is a WordPress landing page plugin that gives me total flexibility in the creation of landing pages. The tool includes predesigned configurations for sales pages and opt-in pages and is very easy to configure and style. A tool like Premise is a must if you plan to take today’s advice to heart.

Posted by : John Jantsch on May 16, 2012 | 7:25 am

Categories : Duct Tape Marketing, Social Media, Web Marketing

Tag : Premise

13 Questions That Will Lead You To Your Perfect Marketing Strategy

posted by: John Jantsch

Tue May 15, 2012

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Plenty of startups try to determine the perfect business model to take to market only to find that the market doesn’t need, want or understand what they are presenting.

The fact is most books or courses on business models take this into consideration by suggesting trial and error scenarios and market hypothesizes prior to launch.

Any business model, or plan for that matter, is little more than a guess and I believe that your best chance for getting that guess right is to build your business model based on a marketing strategy.

This assumes the role a fully developed marketing strategy actually should play in determining the direction of an organization. The fact is most people, if they consider marketing strategy at all, stop at a core message, identity elements and perhaps a sales proposition and call it a strategy.

A marketing strategy is how you plan to use the resources available to you to build an ongoing case that your business, products and services are the obvious choice for a narrowly defined ideal customer.

If you accept this expanded view of marketing strategy then I would suggest you answer the following questions in an attempt to measure where your strategy stands today and where it could go if your understood and integrated it fully as your business model

What about this job, work, or organization are you passionate about?
How does this business serve a higher purpose for you and your customers?
What value do you really bring that benefits your market in ways that your competitors wouldn’t dream of proposing
What’s the dominant personality trait that you need your customers to associate with your business?
What does an ideal client look like?
What is the simple 10-word core message that explains and excites?
How will your market become aware of your business?
How will your market come to trust that you have the answers?
What are the revenue sources that you can tap to grow this business?
Can you describe the perfect customer experience throughout your organization?
What resource gaps and constraints do you need to overcome to achieve your strategy?
What partnerships do you need to create in order to achieve your strategy?
What would the result of using this strategy model to run your business look like?

Posted by : John Jantsch on May 15, 2012 | 7:54 am

Categories : Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Vision

Tag : The Marketing Hourglass

5 Non Spammy Ways To Get a Blogger’s Attention

posted by: John Jantsch

Mon May 14, 2012

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Everyone, from PR firms to individuals with a product to sell, pitches bloggers these days. Getting coverage or exposure for your business by way of a number of highly read blogs should be a foundational element of your PR approach.

So, I thought I would share of few of my thoughts on the most effective ways to get a blogger’s attention and stand out in a way that gives your pitch a far better chance of garnering coverage.

Sadly, it would much easier to write a post on what not to do, but I like to stay on the positive side here.

Whether your goal is to land a guest post, get a review of your product or just advance an idea you’ve got to put in the work to personalize your pitch and build relationships by demonstrating you’re a resource and not a pest.

Make non-spammy comments

One of the best ways to get on the radar of a blogger is to join their community by making relevant comments. Don’t drop in just to add a comment about your business or point to your recent blog post about some unrelated idea. Add to the conversation like someone who actually cares about the conversation and you’ll start to build a relationship based on trust.

Find regular features

Take some time to dig around in the archives of a blog and you’re likely to find some regular features just like you might in a magazine. Then, when it comes time to pitch your idea, you can suggest that it would be a good fit for a certain feature. This will always give your pitch more relevance and offer proof that you know a bit about the blog and that yours is not simply a bulk pitch.

I’ve run a Saturday post for several years now where I feature three services or apps that I call my weekly favs. Smart marketers have picked up on that and often pitch their product for a feature in that post. It’s a little thing, but it suggests a lot.

Look beyond the blog

If you buy that this is a relationship building game, then why not employ a few tools outside the blog to help. Build a Twitter list of your targeted bloggers and pay attention to what they tweet and what the retweet. Look at what they favorite on Twitter for some real meaty clues about what they like,

By monitoring what they do beyond their blog and in social networks you can often find angles that won’t be apparent on a simple media list.

Connect with guests and get referred

Many blogs run guest posts these days and one of the best ways to get your content on the list of potential guest posters is to study and connect with those that are already posting. In fact, you might go as far as to target these folks as suggested above and reach out to a few and ask for introductions.

A guest post on a highly read blog may be one of the most effective marketing tools you can employ so don’t just blast guest post requests, build a case for your post by becoming a part of the community and creating a network within.

Ask for an interview

Many bloggers, even well known bloggers, still work on building their awareness and will jump at almost any opportunity to spread the word about things they are working on. Many bloggers have business interests beyond their blog that need exposure. Many bloggers are also authors and have books to sell.

Consider interviewing some of your targeted bloggers for your own blog or podcast or connect them with other journalist or even customers of yours that might have a reason to want to interview them. An interview might consist of a twenty minute phone conversation or it might just be one well thought out question that you send via email, either way, this a great approach for building both content and relationships.

It warrants repeating, if a mention or link or review in your favorite blog is a worthwhile objective for your business, then put in the work required to get it done right.

Posted by : John Jantsch on May 14, 2012 | 7:28 am

Categories : Duct Tape Marketing, Social Media

Tag : Blogging

Weekend Favs May Twelve

posted by: John Jantsch

Sat May 12, 2012

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My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr or one that I took out there on the road.

New Duct Tape Marketing t-shirt design via Hugh MacLeod Gapingvoid

Good stuff I found this week:

Ming.ly – A personal relationship manager that aggregates your contacts from Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter into a searchable merged address book that allows you to update and communicate on social networks without leaving your Gmail inbox.

Pinstamatic – Allows you to add locations, music, quotes, calendar dates, Twitter profile links, sticky notes and websites to to Pinterest.

Meetings.io – free and simple way to meet face to face online without the need to install software, join a social network or add contacts

Posted by : John Jantsch on May 12, 2012 | 7:39 am

Category : DTM Favs

Tags : Meetings.io, Ming.ly, Pinstamatic

Engaging Your Macro Metric As a True Measure of Success

posted by: John Jantsch

Fri May 11, 2012

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Business owners and marketers are told to measure and quantify everything. The problem is this practice alone can lead to false assumptions and a fixation on things that simply don’t matter that much.

lollipolluza via Flickr

Are website visits, Facebook Likes, newsletter signups or even revenue the true measure of success for your business? Perhaps, but how so? When we simply create a list of what we might call key performance indicators without the proper focus with which to weight them, it all simply becomes an exercise in collecting.

It’s a lot like having a bunch of puzzle pieces without the box top picture that gives the pieces context.

The trick is to set all the measurement and analysis aside for a bit and determine your own unique and overriding “macro metric” of success. This is the one thing that you measure above all as a signal of the health of the business. This is the measure of the success of your overriding marketing strategy.

Once you do that you then you can use other data that measures things like awareness, engagement, sharing, loyalty, relationships, referrals and revenue as way to refine your focus on what matters most.

The macro metric is the core measure of “who you are” or “how you want” the brand to be perceived. It’s the one tangible or intangible signal that you’re being true to why you do what you do.

I’ll warn you, finding this one true measure isn’t always the easiest task and there’s no marketing analytics book that can shortcut this idea for you. You discover it when you decide the higher purpose your business serves and when you then listen to how your community describes that higher purpose.

I determined my macro metric years ago and I’ve used it as a guide for a great deal of what we do. For Duct Tape Marketing the metric is usefulness.

We go to great lengths to determine if what we’re doing is useful to our community and to the market as a whole. This thinking influences our content creation, our education, our products, our follow-up, our strategic partnerships, our analysis of revenue per customer, our traffic building, our lead generation, our lead conversion and even our internal processes to a large degree.

We ask our customers to share what they find useful. We track the number of times that people volunteer that something we’ve done is practical and useful. We get nervous when we don’t hear that word from our community during the course of any given day.

Find your macro metric and tie every other key performance indicator you can track and perhaps a few that you can simply feel to this metric and your brand will flourish.

Oh, and I sincerely hope you found this post useful.

Posted by : John Jantsch on May 11, 2012 | 7:59 am

Categories : Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Strategy

Tag : Macro Metric

5 Meaningful Shifts Shaping Marketing Right Now

posted by: John Jantsch

Thu May 10, 2012

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Trends are funny. In some cases they jump up out of nowhere and demand to be noticed. In other cases, in fact in most cases, they bubble up over a long period, kick around in other industries and finally get realized by a larger group as relevant to their current way of life.

Orbiter7 via Flickr

But trends are also terribly misleading because they are often overstated and simplified and tend to focus on a tool rather than the underlying behavior. Think about when Twitter got hot. Everyone talked about the tool, but few realized that it was simply the embodiment of a way to communicate that people were looking for. Understanding that shift allowed some to take advantage of the behavior rather than the tool and this put them miles ahead of the trend.

Today I want to talk about five shifts that I see making an impact right now on both the way we go to market and the way the market comes to us.

1) Little Commitments

Generic information overload is causing a real bottleneck for marketers. We’ve been told over and over again to produce content, but now the competition for content is choking, rather than informing, our prospects.

Our prospects don’t have or won’t take the time to learn all about our great solutions even if it’s in their best interest to do so. Our job now is to offer them little pieces of information that move them ever so slightly in the direction of personalizing their experience with us.

Tools like the pop up survey from Kiss Insights, a guided content path created by using WordPress plugin Survey Funnel, a guided tour using a tool like WalkMe or the ability to present dynamically relevant content through a tool like GetSmartContent will become increasingly important as ways to filter our own content and create more personalized trust building experiences.

2) Video SEO

One of the most dramatic changes in Google’s indexing of local business pertains to video. Right now a local business has a better chance of ranking for highly relevant search terms using YouTube hosted, highly optimized videos than any other approach.

Smart marketers are serializing their most important keyword phrases and frequently asked questions using video and optimizing these videos through specific file names, descriptions, keywords and transcripts.

Using a tool like Traffic Geyser also makes it easier to spread these videos to other video sharing sites in order to garner further traffic and links.

3) Visual Scanning

One needs looks no further than the current hype of Pinterest or the $1Billion dollar sale of photo sharing site Instagram to witness the visual scanning behavior impact. These sites soared in popularity in large part due to information overload and the stimulation caused by visual interest.

It is far easier to look at a thousand pictures than to consume a thousand words.

To me this doesn’t simply mean jump on the Pinterest bandwagon. It signals a behavior that must be adopted rather than a tool. We must start offering visual scanning of our brands by using images in all that we do.

Get in the habit of taking photos of your world and your customer’s world each and every day.

When we post a status update or amplify a recent blog post on Facebook upload an image and describe the image rather than simply using the blog post thumbnail. In addition to added visual impact, Facebook favors images over most other content and will show your post to more followers.

Use a tool like Postagram that allows you to turn Instragram photos into higher quality photo postcards. Imagine the impact of meeting with a client, snapping a photo and sending them a personalized photo thank you card. Or what about sending your client a postcard of the product you’re building just for them?

4) The Digital Persona

Market research folks have long talked about uncovering the rare combination of factors that lead to fully understanding what a market needs, wants, and believes. Much of this information can be gleaned from demographic and psychographic research, but few things have produced more relevant research into the actual demonstrated behavior of a market than the trail of clues our prospects leave every day online.

In many cases researches now have verified proof that what markets say and what they do online are not always the same thing and this important digital aspect must be one that is considered in the make up of our ideal customer profile.

At the very least we must add browser plugins like Rapportive that give us social media data on the people we interact with to our communication toolset.

We must make our CRM systems understand social behavior and score, nurture and move our leads forward using this data.

We must start to create prospect and client personas that include digital behavior clues.

5) ROBO

Few things have had a more dramatic impact on local business than the behavior to research online to buy offline (ROBO) that is practiced by an approaching 90% of all adults as a way to find local products and services.

What this means is that we must expand the way we think about our website far beyond the means to provide information. Our website must become a tool to drive online searchers and visitors offline into our stores, into our presentation and into our Meetups.

Our websites must feature local call to action tools such as downloadable coupons, samples and trials. We must add and use click to call, schedule or chat functionality that allows for instant engagement.

We must think of ways to create our own offline communities and build these communities with online tools such as LinkedIn Groups, MeetUps or even creating our own leads and referral groups using a tool like LocalBase.

Each new and accepted tactic brings with it corresponding changes in behavior and impact that can only be seen by paying close attention to the underlying shifts rather than focusing on the latest hype.

Posted by : John Jantsch on May 10, 2012 | 7:47 am

Categories : Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media

Tags : rapportive, ROBO, Social CRM, WalkMe

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