Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide – 2nd Edition.
The Referral Engine – Teaching Your Business to Market Itself – by John Jantsch.
Brian Clark, part of the brains behind the ultra successful copyblogger, has written a nice piece on the future of marketing online called Teaching Sells. Go grab this 22 page report.
I am a big proponent of viewing marketing materials as information products and creating products that support your services and services that support your products. Clark lays out a wonderful road-map and a low-cost, high impact set of tools to do just that.
I’ve been using a tool called Slideshare ever since a group asked if they could share one of my presentations with attendees about a year ago.
The service allows you to upload PowerPoint and PDF slide decks and then converts them to a player that can be tagged and made public.
Recently, they also added something called Slidecasts, which allow you to also upload and sync an audio file to create an entire online presentation if you like. As you see below, you can also embed the slides on a web page or blog. There are other ways to accomplish this same thing with the use of Camtasia or iMovie, but this one is really simple.
Another thing I love about the site is that it’s a wealth of inspiration for what to do and what not to do when it comes to slide presentation design and content.
If you present workshops, seminars, or just your latest ideas as a small business owner or marketer, I would like to invite you to join a group I’ve formed on Slideshare just for small business presenters. Join the group and upload, share and comment great small business presentations in an effort to get better at this key marketing skill.
Slide show with audio: Let’s Get Social
You know a lot of folks dismiss Facebook’s leadership as young and inexperienced – and that they are.
They really got beat up over the whole Beacon fiasco
And yet, on several occasions they have made moves that changed the game for all the players. The recent move to allow Facebook apps on any website through a javascript client library is a game changer for anyone in the space. And once again the young and inexperienced leaders of Facebook have everyone else – young and old – scrambling to play catch up.
It’s kind of fun to watch. I don’t know if they will figure the money piece out, but they are wielding a growing clout in the online world.
Another sort of related social media tidbit – A new service called Tweetmeme – designed to allow Twitter lovers to track and keep up on topics launched last week. I’m sure people addicted to Twitter will love it! It will bring some amount of order to the random thoughts tossed around all day on Twitter and may very well become a unique news service.
Social media, and by that I’m lumping together blogs, RSS, social networking and bookmarking, presents the marketer with a rich set of new tools to help in the effort to generate new business.
But, if that’s the only way you view social media, as a set of tools to perform a set of tactics to reach the set of objectives you have always tried to reach with your marketing, then not only are you really missing the opportunity, you will probably find yourself wondering what all the fuss is about.
You can’t approach new media with old thinking. Taking full advantage of social media requires understanding and adopting a specific social media strategy.
First and foremost you must appreciate the differences between social media and, say, direct mail. With direct mail the outcome is likely to create an action, with most social media, it’s to create a connection. Both of these have equally important places in the long-term health of a business, but how they happen is significantly different. Try to do one with the other and results may actually backfire – ie: Ads on Facebook?
I think the best way to look at social media is to view it as a way to open up access points. These points can then be leveraged to create content, connection, and community. Do that well, and they can also add to lead generation, nurturing and conversion.
I’ll talk more about this in a free webinar this Wednesday put on by the good folks at Jigsaw, but here are couple point to ponder.
Choose your social media tools with an ideal interaction in mind
~ Is a blog a starting point or an ending point?
Choose your social media objectives with connection in mind
~ Are you after traffic, primary and secondary links or access to communities that think and act alike?
Earlier this week I got on the phone and chatted for a while with:
Every now and again in this web 2.0 world it’s refreshing to come across something that gets your attention and is decidedly not web 2.0.
One of the staples of some Duct Tape Marketers is the business card strategically placed on community boards in coffee shops and grocery stores. It’s not the right play for every business perhaps, but it’s dirt cheap and can gain some nice exposure for those in the home services business.
A reader of mine passed an ingenious little tool on to me to aid this tactic. The product is called Card Cues. The simple little device allows you to place up to 40 cards in a pre-configured little card holder and pin the entire little package to the bulletin board without taking but a little more room than a traditional business card.
A package of 10 costs you about a buck apiece with shipping. Just go get some. (If you are in the printing business they will sell you some templates that you can personalize for customers.)
Mark your calendar. Entering its third year, the Microsoft Small Business Summit, a nationwide, online event that runs for four days is coming. This year it runs from March 24 through March 27. Summit registrants can participate online from home or office.
I have been asked to kick the summit off with a session on small business marketing so I hope that lots of Duct Tape Marketing readers will be joining me live online on March 24th at 9am PDT!
The summit offers advice from entrepreneurial peers and small business experts on topics ranging from sales, marketing, productivity, mobility, security, financial management and startups.
Over the four days, a variety of panelists will speak, including Cheryl Broussard, financial advisor and author of Sister CEO; Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch; Louis Barajas, author of Latino Journey to Financial Greatness and Small Business, Big Life.
The summit is free and registration is open now. Make sure to register even if you can’t make the live events as you will get access to the archived recordings months after the event.
A few weeks back I asked the question, “What would the perfect CRM look like?”
The question drew lots of conversation and was accompanied by a survey.
I think this comment from Ben Smith of WBP Systems, maker of HeapCRM, sums it up for the true small business.
I just wanted to comment on your great point. I do think that many people confuse “CRM†with “CRM softwareâ€. In an attempt to make this point, we actually spend the first part of our manual discussing a coffee shop and how by simply putting a sticker on the cup they have achieved every goal that you would ask of a CRM.
What someone really should do, to implement a CRM, is get a list of goals they want to achieve with the CRM system (not necessarily software), then find the simplest tool that achieves all of their goals. If you can achieve all of your goals with a spiral ring notebook, then you should use a spiral ring notebook. Of course if you need Salesforce with some-odd add-ons then that’s what you should use.
And perhaps the survey results may support this as well.
Only 61% said they used any form of CRM or Contact Management
More advanced features such as inventory management, partner management, shopping cart integration, lead distribution, quote management were largely unimportant.
Any surprises? Not really – conclusions – keep it simple, don’t make me have to change the culture of the organization to make it work.
