Category Archives: Marketing

Some of Social Media Marketing is Community Management

October 21, 2011Marketing, Social mediacommunity management, Megan Berry, parttimeperfectionist.com, social media marketingTim Berry

Suggestion: don’t just call it all social media marketing. Call at least part of it community management.

Why? Because words and phrases get worn out. Or they get clogged like a motor boat’s propeller in a swamp. And social media marketing has been worn out by too many people with too many fake names talking up too many products with too many fake offers.

I’m not at all against social media marketing; it makes perfect sense in some contexts. The big brand using social media to deliver messages, for example, is social media marketing. And Marketing is not a dirty word. Marketing is getting people to know, like, and trust your brand, so social media ought to be one of the tools.

But community management is a better way to describe the business role of developing personality, relationships with people, and conversation. Marketing is getting people to know, like, and trust. Social media belongs there. Social media should be part of the marketing mix, especially for smaller businesses, individual businesses, and expert businesses.

But there is a part of social media that differs from most of the rest of the marketing mix because it’s inherently conversational. Conversation means as much listening as talking, and no shouting.

Furthermore, the conversation is social media isn’t just a simple dialog, with two people at a time; it’s multidimensional conversation, with a lot of different people involved, at different levels, and different times. Authenticity, meaning real people, real opinions, and real participation, makes a huge difference.

And that, essentially, is community. So at least a subset of social media marketing is community management. It’s helping people, solving problems, expanding the community, and managing issues. It’s building the sense of belonging, involvement, commitment, and caring.

What do you think?

(image: bigstockphoto.com)

How Much Should You Worry About Your Competition?

October 14, 2011Business Research, Business Stories, Marketingcompetition, Emmett Ramey, Joel Spolksy, Oasis Press, Steve Thoeny, Stock ExchangeTim Berry

I’m intrigued with Steve Thoeny’s comment earlier this week to my post about market research. Steve quoted Joel Spolsky, Co-founder Stack Exchange, and one of my favorite writers, with this suggestion:

Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don’t pay any attention to the competition. They’re not relevant to you.

I love Joel’s (and Steve’s) advice about talking to customers. I couldn’t agree more. That’s right on point and good advice.

And I’m intrigued with his take on competition. It reminds me of what Emmett Ramey, founder of Oasis Press, said years ago when we had competing offerings:

The way I see it, we’re standing on a pier, side by side, fishing. I don’t care about the fish sniffing your bait. I’m worried about the ones near mine. And there are plenty of fish for both of us.

That made sense then. We were selling two competing offerings into the same market.

On the other hand, watching for competition is like watching what the fish like. If the fish like salmon eggs and you’re fishing with cheese, get the hint. Sometimes looking at competition is like taking a fresh look at your own business.

What do you think?

(Image: istockphoto.com)

How Can These Over-used Tactics Work?

September 27, 2011Marketingpricing, sales tactics, spam, special offerTim Berry

I saw an offer the other day, on the web of course, something with a normal price of $495.00 knocked down to $19.95. I thought to myself that nobody would ever buy something offered with that patently absurd insult to intelligence.

But I’m pretty sure people do. I learned that the hard way.

I once decided to overrule a direct mail marketing expert, who I had hired, and send out a direct mail campaign for a software product priced at $100 instead of $99.95. He was a real expert too, but I thought I knew my market, and my customers, better than he did. I didn’t.

And spam? Every so often I wonder how spam still exists. Who can be so naïve as to click on those emails and buy the stupid stuff the spammers offer? Is there anybody left? Obviously the answer is yes, because the spam keeps coming. So somebody buys it, right? Or else it wouldn’t be worth sending?

Somebody must buy that stuff. Go figure.

What Kind of Advertising for a Startup

September 14, 2011Marketing, Q&ADuct Tape Marketing, John JantschTim Berry

I revised my timberry.com website a couple of months ago and one of the additions was the ask me page where I offering to answer questions people ask. This question came to me from that page and I think it might be a useful answer for this blog.

Question:

I just started a small business in [a US medium-sized town] home improvement contractor. My question too you is what kind of advertising do you prefer when just getting started

Answer:

First answer, specific to a home improvement contractor: I think you should immediately buy John Jantsch’ book Duct Tape Marketing and read it cover to cover. That’s one of the best ever books on marketing for small business in general, and John uses home improvement contracting for a lot of his examples. It’s as if one of the best minds in marketing had answered your specific question with a brilliant book tailored to you. And that might lead you to his more recent book, the Referral Engine, which will also apply very well to home remodeling.

Second answer, more general, for all small business startups: the question isn’t what kind of advertising, but rather, what kind of marketing strategy. John Jantsch defines marketing as getting people to know, like, and trust you. What works best for you depends entirely on the specifics of you and your business and your target customer. It might be advertising and advertising alone, but I doubt it. I think it’s probably a mix of website marketing, social media, yellow page marketing, and mainly referrals. You need to think first about your business focus, your key target customers, what your message is, and from there, one to best get those key target people to know, like, and trust you.

I did a column a couple of months ago outlining how to do a marketing plan. That might help too.

Is Marketing Dead?

August 5, 2011Marketingamazon.com, Bill Gates, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, TwitterTim Berry

I’m troubled. Some of the smartest, most successful people I know say marketing is dead. It doesn’t matter, they say. It’s a waste of time. Instead…

… just build great product. Disrupt a big market. The buzz will follow.

And it makes some sense. Did Facebook care about marketing, or product? What about Twitter? Amazon.com? You could say their product was their marketing.

Which, however, is something like saying higher education is useless because Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all dropped out of college.

No doubt marketing is all mixed up and turned inside out these days. It’s still a strong force in big businesses with multi-million-dollar advertising budgets, but there’s this new world in which thought, content, effort and authenticity make up for money. You don’t necessarily buy attention in this new world – you can earn it instead.

But a lot of the core concepts — like understanding your target markets, and developing your main messages, and pricing as message, and managing channels – are as important as ever.

Because there are the brilliant exceptions to the rule, and then there’s the rule.

(image: igoncepts/istockphoto.com)

Endorse Me, You Gypsy Savage, Endorse Me!

March 23, 2011Business Mistakes, Business Stories, Marketing, WeblogsAnita Campbell, Federal Trade Commission, FTC, Geno Prussakov, Learn and Master Guitar, Legacy LearningTim Berry

On the one hand, who likes big government? The FTC, Federal Trade Commission, sounds like the feds. Gear up your paranoia. On the other hand, who likes fake endorsements? And then — can I borrow your hand to make the third hand, please — wow! How can we resist highlighting this:

On Monday the FTC published a bulletin with the catchy title: Firm to Pay FTC $250,000 to Settle Charges That It Used Misleading Online “Consumer” and “Independent” Reviews. Here’s a summary, direct quote from that document:

The Learn and Master Guitar program promoted by Legacy Learning and Smith is sold as a way to learn the guitar at home using DVDs and written materials. According to the FTC’s complaint, Legacy Learning advertised using an online affiliate program, through which it recruited ‘Review Ad’ affiliates to promote its courses through endorsements in articles, blog posts, and other online editorial material, with the endorsements appearing close to hyperlinks to Legacy’s website. Affiliates received in exchange for substantial commissions on the sale of each product resulting from referrals.

I’m glad they got them. Fake endorsements are dishonest, they dilute real endorsements, they pollute the Web, and they tarnish the wisdom of the crowd. So hooray for the FTC, catching the spoilers who make it worse for everyone else. Get those evil-doers.

But then, wait, what was that? This is a more direct quote from the same document:

According to the FTC, such endorsements generated more than $5 million in sales of Legacy’s courses.

Now that worries me. I can subtract $250,000 from $5 million in my head, without needing an accountant or even a calculator. It comes to $4.75 million. What’s wrong with this picture?

My thanks to Anita Campbell who pointed on Twitter to Geno Prussakov’s blog post on this.

(Image: Oleg Golovnev/Shutterstock)

Never Confuse a Domain Name With Marketing

March 16, 2011Marketing, Web/Techdomain names, search marketing, SEOTim Berry

Once upon a time I ran into a group of entrepreneurs who had a business plan based on the simple power of a domain name. I won’t say what that name really was, but let’s pretend it was books.com. In their business plan they touted their ownership of this domain name repeatedly. But they had no real marketing plan, just a domain name.

It was as if it were like Field of Dreams, only slightly modified: “if you have the domain name, they will come.”

No dice. It didn’t work. That was back a few years in the heyday, when everybody who had a decent domain name was sure they’d be rich in short order. And that business, not surprisingly, fizzled.

Although it wasn’t books.com, that name illustrates a point very well. If you’re curious, type books.com into your browser. It redirects to www.barnesandnoble.com. I don’t know the history of the domain books.com, but I think that fact alone makes my point pretty well: Obviously Barnes and Noble, the bookseller, owns books.com today. They don’t redirect Barnes and Noble to books.com; quite the contrary — books.com goes to Barnes and Noble. Do you see what I mean?

Which is a better name for online book selling — amazon.com or books.com? Which one is the giant success?

That It Didn’t Work Then Doesn’t Mean it Won’t Work Now

January 13, 2011Back to Fundamentals, Management, Marketingfresh look, marketing campaignsTim Berry

I’ve had another stark reminder this week: with the way things change so fast, these days. we can never assume that what didn’t work for our business even two or three years ago won’t work now if we try it again.

That’s tough. It’s so easy to get locked in mentally.

I’m thanking my lucky stars right now that I shut up a few weeks ago. I was in one of our regular coordination meetings. As the marketing team shared its doings, I recognized one new campaign as very much like one that had failed spectacularly a few years ago. I almost said that it had failed in the past, and that it wouldn’t work, but I’m not in charge of marketing and they do a great job. I hope I didn’t roll my eyes. I was sure it wouldn’t work.

So earlier this week I saw the results, and it did work; quite well, in fact. And now I’m very glad I shut up in that meeting.

Just because it didn’t work before doesn’t mean it won’t work now. Things are always changing.