Marketing Ideas!

One of the first things the uninitiated say when I mention Twitter is “why do you care what other people are doing?”

It’s true the Twitter interface includes the ever-present question: What are you doing? But I submit this is perhaps the most misleading question ever.

Twitter Myth #1: Twitter is nothing more than a glorified Facebook status update.

Twitter isn’t about what you are doing “right now.” It’s about connecting, interacting, and having conversations (big or little).

Still not sure? Check out this Twitter case study about how, through the use of  Twitter, Austin and about 185 other communities around the world raised awareness and funds for a global charity.

If you were at Twestival, whether in Austin or any of the other locations, you could answer the Twitter question by stating: Saving the world. That’s pretty significant.

So, if you’re one of those that thinks Twitter is a superficial, teeny-boppy trend, you may want to think again.

In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins wrote about Dave Scott, the legendary six-time champion of the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon. Scott would train by riding his bike 75 miles, swimming 20,000 meters, and running 17 miles every single day (on average). He obviously didn’t have a problem with his weight. Still, he felt a low-fat, high-carb diet would help give him an edge. Thus, Dave Scott would rinse his cottage cheese to get rid of the extra fat. There’s no evidence that doing this helped him win all those Ironman Triathlons. But it was one small step that he believed made him better.

The reason I bring this up is that taking care of such minute details is what the ultra disciplined do. It’s what the elite performing companies (and individuals) do. But it is part of an evolution. There is a ton of advice for small business (much of it free) on how to create a marketing plan, use social media, or how to run a business. Some of it is good fundamental advice. Some of it is very much like rinsing cottage cheese.

As much as I would like to believe it to be true, rinsing cottage cheese isn’t going to help me win any kind of race. I would have to first put in a lot of hard work, discipline myself to follow a plan, and work hard to achieve some much less, minor goals.

If your small business is getting into the realm of social media and Internet marketing, if you’re drinking up all the Internet gurus have to say, remind yourself that it is important to take a first step. In fact, below are four key aspects that you should fully embrace as you start using social media:

1. Start with a blog. Discipline yourself to write in it everyday.
2. Understand the three rings of social media: publishing, sharing, networking and know when to use them.
3. Identify which tools affect which area (or ring).
4. Create a process that will allow you to understand why you are doing things and why it’s working (or not working).

With these fundamentals under your belt, it now becomes possible to refine your efforts, to improve on your performance, increase your ROI by another .1% and bring your organization to another level. In other words, now you can start to rinse your cottage cheese.

Many small business owners make decisions based on one question: can I afford to do this?

Despite a very low price tag in general, email marketing is no different. Most small businesses are unaware of the specifics of email marketing, and a proliferation of email marketing service providers complicates the decision making process.

Ultimately, it’s easier to compare what you know and what you can measure: the price. But this process is inherently flawed, as shopping for the lowest price rarely delivers the best value.

So how does a small business choose the right email marketing service provider? To begin to answer this question, it’s important to look at three key aspects that help differentiate most email marketing services. While any service will likely deliver a good ROI (email marketing is so inexpensive that it’s hard not to receive some ROI from your efforts), by evaluating your short list of email marketing service providers on these three areas, you’ll be better able to determine the right service provider for your company.

How to Evaluate Email Marketing Service Providers

For the sake of full disclosure, this blog is written by the owner of Aperio Marketing, an email marketing service provider. I hope you will check us out, yet I also know we are not the right solution for everyone. So I hope you can use this information to form an objective opinion of your options and find the right fit and the right solution for your needs.

These are three important features you need to look at:

• Tracking capabilities (e.g., can you identify how someone found you?)
• Don’t look at the price so much as the pricing model.
• Make sure their customer service fits your needs

Tracking capabilities

You frequently hear how important it is to send targeted messages. What’s not frequently discussed is how to do this. That’s a topic too big for this post, but we can start that conversation now.

A great place to start is by knowing who’s on your list.  While it may be hard to discover their likes and dislikes, or other demographic information, it should be fairly easy to track where the contact found you. This one fact could tell you a lot about your contacts’ likes, and preferences, among other things.

In face-to-face networking events, meetings, or other interpersonal scenarios, this is fairly easy. When you meet someone and receive their business card (and permission to contact them), you can create a group or list just for the event, then put the contacts into that group. Now you can send them messages that revolve around that common experience, a technique that can be very powerful.

It’s a little different for those who find you online. To solve this problem, search for an email marketing service provider that provides unlimited signup screens (for free — some charge for additional signup screens). You can use signup screens to tie-in with specific lists or groups on the back end, thus giving you good data on which pages are converting the most traffics into contacts. This strategy becomes really powerful if you are able to trigger auto-responders based on the signup screen used.

Pricing Structure

I’ll admit this one falls into a subjective category, but it’s a topic on which I have strong feelings. There are three main pricing models for email marketing service providers: database size, pay-as-you-go, and volume of emails sent. For the most part, the difference in price is nominal. If you are simply pinching pennies, then there may be no other solution than the lowest possible price. But, again, if you’re looking for the right fit for your organization, then you should strongly consider what your firm believes in and how your vendor’s pricing model matches up.

Database size

For many, this is the most economical choice, because you can send as many emails as you want without incurring additional fees. Your cost is based only on the size of your database. From my perspective, this is the worst model for small business and here’s why:

• Small businesses needs to be able to grow their list of contacts without penalty. This model unfairly penalizes list owners for growing a database, even if it isn’t used for email marketing. I think this is backwards of how it should work. Especially in a small business environment where resources are scarce, you should be able to grow your list of contacts as large as you need it to be without penalty. Storing emails and not using them has little intrinsic value.

• The model is inherently unethical. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, this model is unethical. Under this model, you can send as many emails as you want, whenever you want. Thus the sender is in a position to essentially spam contacts in the database at no penalty. The small business owner may suffer because of the ill-will that may be generated, but the real victims in this scenario are the recipients. Let’s face it: email marketing doesn’t have a good reputation, and it’s pricing models like this that contribute to this perception.

Pay-as-you-go

A slightly better option is the pay-as-you-go model, which is a little like a cell phone plan. You buy a certain amount of email credits that you can send, and you keep the volume of emails within that set amount. This option is better than the database size model in that the small business owner is not penalized for growing the list size, and there are some controls in place for not sending an unlimited amount of emails.

The biggest problem with this model is again an ethical one. Many of these plans “expire” the email credits bought. When the expiration date is coming up, you have to “use ‘em or lose ‘em,” which can encourage sending unwanted emails.

Volume of emails sent

Perhaps the best model of the three is a volume-based model. Under this model, you are not penalized for growing your list and you only pay when you send emails. In other words, you are only paying when there’s opportunity for ROI, which is a good, and fair, practice (and similar to the pay-as-you-go model).

The biggest upside here is that there are no expiring email credits, and in some plans, if you don’t send any emails, you don’t have to pay anything. So if you only send out a quarterly email newsletter, you are only invoiced four times a year.

Customer service

Perhaps the area that should be scrutinized the most is customer service. Many of the service providers that a small business will consider are based on a “self-service” model, meaning the small business is responsible for all aspects of creating, sending, and measuring campaigns. Because of this, and the lack of experience many small business have with email marketing, the “batch and blast” emails typify the approach most organizations use.

But if you really wanted to incorporate email marketing into your marketing plan as a substantial tool, to build relationships, and boost revenue, you will want to learn how to use the tools properly. During your evaluation period, find out what sort of education programs and staffing the service providers offer to help you through the learning curve.

The last, and most important area to consider is your relationship with the vendor. Because of these low price points, most email service providers are looking to gain customers on a national or global stage. In stark contrast, many small businesses are local and use local resources. Local businesses understand the value of using other local services. Local businesses can usually support your quicker, better, and more efficiently than a global company can, plus you are supporting your local economy, which is no small thing. So consider a local email marketing service provider as one of your vendors. If you are using a local company, they may have local training capabilties, and may even be able to come to your location to educate you on their system.

One of the first questions I get from my clients is “what type of website should I have?” The answer is, “it depends,” but for virtually all websites, getting people to your site and engaging them on some level is of primary importance. So, regardless of whatever else you do with your website, you absolutely need to have a corporate blog. The next question I receive (especially after delivering the “blog” message) is: “I don’t have the resources for a blog. Do I have to have one?”

The answer is Yes. And here are 10 reasons why your small business should have a blog.

1. Givers gain.
In the words of BNI chapters everywhere, “givers gain.” As Wikipedia defines it, this simply means that “when (business) people set goals to help others and honestly work to achieve these goals, they usually gained the most out of the experience – through a reciprocal benefit.” By providing a blog, you are providing a resource that should be educating and helping those most interested in your offerings.

2. Search engines love it.
Search engines want to direct their users to good, topical, useful information. The typical, static, corporate web site is set up with content, which then remains unchanged for months on end. In this day and age, updating content is a way to stay relevant and topical. Thus, search engines love it, which means you stand a better chance at getting indexed frequently and ranked higher in search results.

3. It should be the center of your social media strategy.
By updating your blog, you can simultaneously update your accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc., etc. This will make all of those accounts appear more active, all because you updated one critical tool: your blog. It can be that powerful.

4. Keeps you up-to-date on industry events/topics.
Keeping and managing a blog can seem like a daunting responsibility. However, it is also one of the best ways to to stay abreast on industry events and topics, because you will always be on the lookout for good information and subjects to put into your blog. If you can develop this skill, this could be a key competitive advantage for you and your organization.

5. Communication is important.
The key to doing business is the ability to communicate clearly with your prospects and customers. A blog will help you get your message out there and help you hone your communciation skills.

6. Keep your writing skills sharp.
Hate to state the obvious, but writing is a subset of communication and is becoming more and more important. Blogs are a great way to discipline yourself to write every day (if not every day, then more frequently than you are now).

7. Real time market research.
Your blog audience will be people that are interested in what  you’re writing about. If you don’t have an audience, that should tell you something. If you do have an audience, get them involved, get them to comment on your posts. The information you could learn about your company and your positioning in the marketplace could be huge.

8. Breath personality into your company.
So often many companies try to carefully control their brand image. In the end, the end result is a sterile presense that is difficult for buyers to identify with. But a blog can help show the humanity of your organization, especially if you talk about some of the charity events you participate in, and other day-to-day (but business related) topics that will resonate with others.

9. It’s dirt cheap.
Outside of a time commitment, you get all of these benefits, and more, for dirt cheap (in many instances free).

10. It will teach you new things.
Many teachers say the learn as much from their students as they teach. Keeping a blog is very similar. Challenging? Yes, sometimes it is. Rewarding? You bet.