Back in my high-tech business analyst days, it was hard not to focus on bells and whistles. There were so many. Computer speed, storage, input devices, monitors, software galore, everything new. Like fish with lures, we were attracted by the latest shiny new thing. Way too much.
I had to learn, back then, how much more important benefits are. Why does the customer care? What do you really do for them? Bells and whistles turn on the engineers and sometimes the reviewers; but people buy benefits, not features.
Along those lines, I enjoyed Carolyn Higgins’ “What Do You Really Sell?” post yesterday (and thanks to Anita Cambell of Small Business Trends for alerting me to it) about how a seemingly trivial detail pushed her to Peet’s Coffee instead of Starbucks. It wasn’t the coffee. It wasn’t the availability of wireless. It was the easy, immediate access to wireless–without an extra step.
It’s really a good idea to take a step away from your business to look at what people are really getting from you. Does Starbucks sell coffee, consistency, a place to meet, wireless access or what? Or, for that matter, is business plan software about the software or the business planning? Is a car for transportation, status, fun or what?
It’s an old story, really, but Carolyn’s post reminded me. It was hard for me to learn. Theodore Leavitt, marketing guru, once said people don’t buy drills because they want drills; they buy them because they want holes.
Good to remember, particularly in the startup stage. Think how this impacts your marketing message and, ultimately, your marketing strategy.
We all know there’s a huge boom in mobile computing and mobile marketing, but does that mean you either develop phone applications or look on from the sidelines longingly? Not hardly.
I read How to get in on the Mobile boom on VentureBeat yesterday. What I like about that post (aside from the fact that it’s written by my daughter) is the nice list of options. It’s a good reminder that you don’t necessarily have to create the world’s best iPhone application to take your business into the mobile world. It can be as simple as buying advertising. And it can also be staged, taking ads as a first step and seeing how that goes before you go on.
This is good advice:
Don’t just go charging in to develop your own iPhone app. Take just a little time to consider what makes the most sense for your company. Mobile advertising can be a great way to get your feet wet, while building up a full mobile presence requires a bigger investment with the possibility of greater rewards and risks.
She points out five main options, three of them variations on advertising, and two of them involving code and programming and mobile apps.
1. Advertising inside applications.
The Apple App Market has 115,000 apps, and the Android market already has 13,000 according to a Mobclix App Snapshot in a recent SMART report. In-app advertising can allow in-depth targeting based not only on application, but also by behavior, demographic information and location.
2. Advertising on the mobile web.
Most new phones have web browsing, so there’s a range of expense levels and targeting available.
3. Sponsoring an application.
Let somebody else do the software, but join them in the branding.
An example of this is the 50 Cent “Baby By Me” sound lab that allows the user to remix 50 Cent’s latest song, while prominently featuring Vitamin Water. This is much less common, but depending on your marketing strategy, might be a good middle way between banner ads and developing your own application.
4. Create a customized mobile website.
It’s not always that hard, as more platforms become available, customizations of existing websites, optimizing with CSS and other tools. Lever off what you already have, and get onto the mobile browsers on phones.
5. Create a mobile application.
More resources required–more risk, too–but the web application can also be the biggest win. The post ticks off some intriguingly big successes, like Adobe’s iPhone Photoshop application; eBay’s iPhone application; and Pandora, the internet radio web application, which discovered its new iPhone application is generating half of its new signups.
I was searching for an iPhone keyboard because I’d like one. The idea of taking just the iPhone on business travel is attractive to me, but without a keyboard, forget it. So I searched and came up with this. In case you can’t read it (I shrunk the page to fit here), it’s saying that this keyboard connects to the iPhone via Bluetooth, but not on any currently available iPhone. It says you can add your name to the list of people waiting to buy it.
And if you’re curious, or interested, click the picture; it goes back to the source.
I couldn’t resist passing this on, because it’s a novel approach. The product doesn’t work until the larger vendor does something. But here it is.
Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, is one of the most interesting and useful books I’ve read in the last two years. It’s about how we use, lose, push, and forget ideas, stories, news leads and such. In short, how we make ideas stick.
I was browsing the Web over the weekend and found this very good six-minute talk by co-author Chip Heath. It’s a good summary of an important book.
If you can’t see that here, you can click here to go to the original on YouTube.
There’s no question that marketing is changing. Advertising is dying and getting reborn all over the place, and word-of-mouth is leveraged by technology tools. The problem is how, how much, how fast and how does it affect your business? It’s a new world, with a changed landscape.
For idea leadership in this realm, look to Seth Godin: his books and his blog. He’s redefining advertising as “shouting.” And he looks to a new kind of marketing built on being remarkable, in a very literal sense of the word: remarkable, as in something that people will talk about. And for practical how-to leadership, I recommend John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing founder, redefining marketing as getting people to know, like and trust you.
And for actually working rapidly changing marketing assumptions into your own business plan, frankly, it’s hard these days. It’s complicated because the landscape is built on sand mines; it crumbles fast.
I recommend you use a methodology somewhat akin to following the money for the financial portions of your plan. But for the marketing portions, you follow the attention. You could call that eyeballs (a popular web term), or mindshare, if you prefer.
Start with attention. Ask yourself what makes people aware of a need, a problem or a want that you solve. You could call that an itch, because need is misleading: People buy a lot of goods and services they don’t really need. So you want to understand what gives people the itch that leads to you when they scratch it. And then you understand how to scratch the itch: Where do they look for solutions? Is it habit, the shop next door? Do they look in some repository in their mind or memory, like some ad they’ve got stored in the back of their mind? Or do they open a web page and do a Google or some other search?
Imagine an advertising world where … spending on interactive, one-to-one advertising formats surpasses traditional, one-to-many advertising vehicles, and a significant share of ad space is sold through auctions and exchanges. Advertisers know who viewed and acted on an ad and pay based on real impact rather than estimated “impressions.” Consumers self-select which ads they watch and share preferred ads with peers. User-generated advertising is as prevalent (and appealing) as agency-created spots.
And Glass adds his own commentary, from his advertising professional’s point of view.
There is no question that the future of advertising will look radically different from its past. The push for control of attention, creativity, measurements and inventory will reshape the advertising value chain and shift the balance of power.
And what can you do about it? Follow the attention. Follow the eyeballs.
Sometimes I worry that in blogs and such there’s so much attention to new market, social media and new trends that we forget the basics. It’s a matter of learning to crawl first, then walk and only then run. Before you worry too much about your Twitter profile and website, cover the basics:
Signage, Appearance, Ambience. OK, I admit, if you’re solopreneur doing an expert business only on the web, then yes, worry about your website and your Twitter profile. But that’s all we ever hear on blogs and Twitter, when there are so many businesses worried about that while not doing the basics in the real world. My favorite coffee place in Bend, Ore., had been closed on Sunday. Last weekend it had a sign outside on the lawn, facing the traffic on the street: “Now Open Sundays.” Simple is good, right? I’d been going somewhere else on Sundays automatically; now I won’t. Think about how much you judge a business by its outside appearance. Does the signage fit the promise? Sometimes quirky and rustic is cool (some restaurants, an antique store, jams and jellies maybe) but how is it for German-Japanese auto repair? For years I’ve walked by an old office in a beaten-up office complex with dark windows and old curtains and a very old wooden sign, looking like it was done in a high-school shop class, saying “Business Planning Concepts.” No, I don’t think so. And if your face on the world, your appearance and your ambiance are your website, then, yes, work on your website.
Directories and such: being found where people look. What used to be the Yellow Pages is now Google Maps, Yahoo! directories, Bing, MSN, AOL, not to mention the local Chamber of Commerce, directories in local newspapers, specific trade and industry directories, related website directories. Think about where and how people look when they want to find a business like yours. Be there.
Be an expert. Don’t ever underestimate the power of being quoted by others in your area of expertise. Sure, there’s a lot to be said for working with related blogs, making comments and so on. But you can start with local events, trade shows, local media. Can you write for the local Chamber of Commerce magazine? Do you know the editor of the local newspaper? Can you be a speaker at the industry show?
Serendipity: you can’t do any of the above without figuring out whom you think your customers are, what they want, where they look for solutions, and so on. You’re already on your way to a marketing plan.
I’ve followed the Free controversy myself, and posted about it here on this blog, and here on the Huffington Post, when two of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin, squared off about it a few months ago. Gladwell essentially hated the idea, and Godin declared it here whether we like it or not.
If I had to choose one short description of the basic idea, it would be this paragraph from Anderson’s 2008 story in Wired:
Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multi-player online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.
King has a gift for summary. He says in his post:
Free has been used effectively as a business strategy and marketing tactic for pretty much as long as businesses have existed. Given how widespread and successful free is and has been, I don’t see how you challenge the concept.
The only place I see room for criticism is if you think Anderson is suggesting that free is a complete business model. Obviously, if free means no source of revenue then it is destined for failure. But I don’t think this is what Anderson is suggesting.
King goes on to point out several examples. He also points out that it could be tactic, strategy or something else. And it’s not that new an idea, either (Chris Anderson would agree with all three).
Are you looking at using a free offer as part of a business plan? You’ll have good company. I do hope, though, that you define for yourself the specific business objectives (traffic, visibility, whatever) and put in some metrics so you can measure results.
Sabrina Parsons posted For the best customer service: TWEET! on her MommyCEO blog earlier this month. She’d called customer service repeatedly, left messages and gotten no response. Then she tweeted about it, and this (the photo below) is what she got: a new, replacement pair of shoes for her son.
This could seem like a good story of a good company, but there’s that dark side to it, the bad service first, followed by good service after it appeared on Twitter. She said:
Here is a company that produces an excellent product and seems to care about customers. But their customer service process is broken. If only those of us who tweet can get good customer care–then they need to fix their process. Don’t get me wrong, though–I love the personal attention I can get from companies via Twitter. But I know those days are numbered. At some point there will be too many people doing the same thing, and Twitter won’t be a good communication vehicle. So companies like this need to fix their customer service issues NOW.
I agree with her conclusion. Twitter is new and exciting, a classic shiny new thing that we can all play with. But mind the telephone in the meantime.
I admit it: Business development (bizdev) seemed to me like an internet catch-all job with little definition, little standardization and–all too frequently–little meaning. And I say “admit” it and “seemed to me” because I know that’s a very negative generalization, often plain wrong. But there was a time when every next person in those awkward networking sessions was in “bizdev.”
It seemed at one point that business development was the title businesses gave to people who worked in marketing but didn’t have a clear job description.
However, as I look at it today, bizdev, done well, is an essential part of our business at Palo Alto Software. It really helped us grow. And some of our best people have carried that title. And my biased, old-fashioned view is really off base. Business development has grown up.
I was delighted to see Seth Godin’s Blog: Understanding business development yesterday, because Godin takes a brief pause from his normal fare to go into a thorough and practical explanation of how important business development is, and what it does.
That includes six concrete examples of business development in the real world and 12 tips on how to do it better.
If you’re intimidated by the thought of jumping into the online video pond, don’t be. It’s a piece of cake to do and YouTube simplifies the process for you.
With a simple camera like a Flip and a few minutes, you too can add good value and content to your website or blog.
Trends: solopreneurs, the new artisan economy, social media, a lot of one-on-one relationships, the long tail, splitting larger groups into smaller groups. More channels, each of them more focused.
With that in mind:
For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.
Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word-of-mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.
Examples include a food cart in San Francisco, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, an antique store in Ohio, a bed and breakfast in North Carolina, etc. My favorite is from Becky McCray, a Twitter friend of mine. She runs a liquor store and cattle ranch in Oklahoma, and does a blog named Small Biz Survival:
In towns like hers, with only 5,000 people, small-business owners can feel isolated, she said. But on Twitter, she has learned business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and startup tips from the founder of several tech companies.
What I particularly like about this idea are the focus and specificity. It’s target marketing executed well, using a good tool.
One word of caution: I don’t know the rest of these small businesses, but I follow Becky on Twitter and she’s there as a person, not a product, not a company. From what I see on Twitter, that’s an important factor. Relationships are between people, much more than between companies and people. Sure, there are exceptions, but that’s the rule.
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I had to learn, back then, how much more important benefits are. Why does the customer care? What do you really do for them? Bells and whistles turn on the engineers and sometimes the reviewers; but people buy benefits, not features. 
I read 
There’s no question that marketing is changing. Advertising is dying and getting reborn all over the place, and word-of-mouth is leveraged by technology tools. The problem is how, how much, how fast and how does it affect your business? It’s a new world, with a changed landscape.
Sabrina Parsons posted 
