Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’
Posted By Michael D'Elicio / 27th January 2009
“To … not prepare is the greatest of crimes; to be prepared beforehand for any contingency is the greatest of virtues.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Most small businesses didn’t open shop because they wanted to go into marketing – they either were skilled in their field, or saw a niche to be filled wherein they could make a lot of money. If they failed to plan for how to drum up business, they learned soon enough that they needed to get the word out. Many think that a big sign out front, or a branded vehicle with contact information is enough. And who knows, in some towns, maybe these tactics are enough to generate business.
But this is not marketing. This is advertising. Marketing, as defined by Laura Lake, is “the systematic planning, implementation and control of a mix of business activities intended to bring together buyers and sellers for the mutually advantageous exchange or transfer of products.” In other words, it’s the strategy. Advertising should be part of any comprehensive plan, but it’s only a part. You want to come up with a long-term plan before engaging in any activity that’s going to cost you money.
And strategy, as Sun Tzu will tell you, is the art of being prepared. A marketing campaign will outline tactics, timelines, techniques, and the tracking of progress, so that the strategy can be adjusted down the line. Anything less and you’re wasting valuable resources.
Here are some questions to ask yourself while determining where you want your marketing strategy to take you:
• What are we seeking to gain from this project?
• How much time and effort can we afford to spend?
• Who are our target markets?
• What is our marketing budget?
• Does our current brand effectively target our market segments? Why or why not?
• What aspects of our business are we looking to promote the most?
• Are there paths of distribution we are looking to open?
• Where do we view our web presence in terms of priority?
• What are our benchmarks for moving to the next level?
If you can answer these questions sufficiently, only then are you ready for implementation of any component, whether it be advertising, public relations, or online social networking.
It’s that kind of preparation that will make your strategy a cost-effective one.
Posted By Michael D'Elicio / 21st January 2009
I once had a friend who was a fantastic cook. She had been trained as a sous chef at a 5-Star restaurant, and had opened up her own restaurant with her mother. I used to love eating there, where she would mix Mexican cuisine with New American masterfully and with relative ease. But when I’d go over her house to hang out, she’d microwave her own dinner. Her attitude was, “I gave at the kitchen.”
If you’re a small business owner or consultant, you probably have become an expert at solving people’s problems – all people, that is, except for yourself. There are scores of reasons, some valid and some just excuses, but we always tend to deprive ourselves of the very services we perform day in and day out for others. And if this doesn’t (or can’t) apply in a literal sense, we are all guilty of sacrificing our own business’s needs in favor of taking care of our customers.
Today, I’d like us all to consider what we need to do to mind our own stores, specifically in terms of marketing. What can I do right now that will move me closer to where I want my business to be? What aspect of my marketing strategy is being neglected? And finally, am I communicating to the public my products/services in a way which reflects my values and my personality so that they stand out, or am I phoning it in, satisfied to blend in with mediocre efforts?
Life’s too short. Treat yourself to business makeover.
Posted By Michael D'Elicio / 20th January 2009
Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
- from “The Dolt” by Donald Barthelme
I was reminded of this great quote from one of my favorite short story writers this morning, as I had a meeting with a group of clients, eager to grow their small business, excited about the potential afforded them by the internet, and absolutely overwhelmed by the task at hand.
“Where do we start?” I was asked several times. They’ve just got a website up, with no online presence at all. Do we blog? Who’s gonna know about the blog? How do we publicize it? What do we talk about?
I think the reason I like the above quote so much is that, for me anyway, it implies that there is no right answer: that starting off is a haphazard and messy endeavor, which is why it’s the hardest thing of all for a storyteller like Barthelme. And marketing is a form of storytelling.
Having said that, I think there are some definite questions to answer for yourself to help you begin down the path of an internet marketing campaign.
- What are your goals? Are you looking to acquire online customers? Grow your customer base from local to national? Establish yourself locally? Are you trying to develop and market new products/services, or educate your client base on current ones? And don’t be too vague. “I want to make more money” is a fine desire, but it’s not a practical goal. Determine what your goals are in succinct and straightforward terms, and engineering a plan to that end becomes loads easier.
- Evaluate your resources. You may have the most ambitious goals in the world, but if you don’t have the money or the manpower to pull them off, they’re only pleasant daydreams you’ll have time to ponder while business isn’t coming in. Be practical, and start small. Go for cost-effectiveness, the biggest bang for your buck – online news releases are a good example, as is SEO. And weigh which you have more of, time or money. Time, money, or a combination of both has solved every problem since the pyramids (I suppose the Egyptians also took advantage of free labor…interns!)
- Research. Find out where your clients are hanging out online. Find out what trends they’re leaning towards. Read anything and everything that pertains to your industry, your client’s demographic, and the tools you’re looking to use. Or if you don’t have the time, find someone who can. The closest that marketing gets to science is in its statistical data, and so much can be readily found today, particularly online. Don’t miss out.
And lastly, jump in. Your best research subject will be your own project, and trial and error your best teachers. Don’t be afraid to try something crazy, but don’t ignore the results if they come back disappointing. To begin may be the worst of all, but it only takes a moment to do.
Happy beginnings to you, and to us all here in the United States, as we collectively begin a new chapter today.
Posted By Michael D'Elicio / 16th January 2009
New Tools for Small Businesses
Here’s an excerpt from an article I just read, discussing the ability to organize online and why it’s become so suddenly powerful (full article here):
Social networking is not new and not about technology. It’s not about MySpace, Facebook or YouTube; instead it’s about what all of us do every day: kindle and expand networks of friends, family, co-workers, etc. In the political context it’s about finding and building communities of interest, linking common struggles and acting collectively. Facebook and other online social networking tools are just a new way for people engage in this age-old activity.
But at the same time, the online universe is not simply another place for people to congregate, circulate a petition, debate politics or mail out a newsletter. Nor is it simply a new technology like cable television–merely bringing more channels into the home. Instead, the web is increasingly looking like the invention of the printing press, which radically changed the lives of even those who could not read, by spurring the Protestant reformation and scientific revolution.
During the past several years, the Internet has evolved from its first generation as a static information portal (e.g. websites) to what is now referred to as Web 2.0, marked by the explosion of user-generated and interactive content. According to Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations and one of the best chroniclers of the social implications of Web 2.0, this communications revolution promises to be the “largest increase in human expressive capability in history.” There are five reasons why this revolutionary electronic space is especially relevant to the future of the global social movements:
1. Group Formation: New social networking tools, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to e-mail and listservs, make forming groups–and hopefully social movements–much easier. Every time organizers knock on doors, hold a community meeting or organize a protest the primary goal is to entice individuals into group activity; they hope to transform isolated actors with little social power into a powerful collective force for social change. The problem is that group formation has always been very hard to do.
What is new about tools like Facebook is that they make more varieties of group formation possible. Now, totally on their own, millions of people are finding others who care about the same things they do, whether it be around oyster farming, workplace complaints or radical politics. What the web has revealed is that there were thousands of these latent groups that for hundreds of years were never able to form, because it was too difficult for people to identify others with similar interests and too difficult for them to efficiently communicate when they did. So now even the most transient and marginalized sectors in society can potentially form support and sharing networks. Thousands from the homeless community, for example, have gathered online to share their stories and swap survival strategies, often posting from public libraries.
At their core, social movements are about group formation, and suddenly the tools exist to make it much easier to bring people together. In practice, we might begin by helping ordinary people access and learn how to use these tools and enable them to uncover their own latent groups–groups that may well not fit neatly into narrow organizational agendas. Social movement activists might also spend more time trafficking where people are already gathering online, such as within the Obama social networks, and practice getting in the middle conversations and shifting debates.
2. Scale and amplification: With a single keystroke, social movements can now push information out to millions of people and lift up marginalized voices into national, and even global, spheres. But scale increasingly does not just mean trying to reach the whole world, especially as it has become increasingly difficult to break through the online noise. Scale is also about surgically communicating with discrete sets of readers. At GLS, for example, rather than targeting the global labor movement writ large, we have tried to target the narrow subset of the global labor movement that is grappling with long-term, strategic questions of worker and class representation in the global economy. Two decades ago we could never have precisely and cheaply carved out this audience.
3. Interactivity: The web is not a one-way transmission belt like television; it’s more akin to the telephone, allowing conversation, intimacy and debate by tapping into the fundamental human desire for self-expression and shared communication. Much of the strength of social movement organizations lies in their ability to empower those shut out of elite political activity to participate. With the Internet encouraging this participatory tendency, social movements need to approach their technology platforms as more than just a new way to send out fliers and opinion pieces or run petition drives. They need to build freewheeling electronic spaces where people can share, debate and collaborate.
4. Destruction of hierarchies: Elites have long dominated the broadcast and distribution networks, making them the primary gatekeepers of information flow, allowing them to frame and dominate political discourse, and decide what is and what is not news. But new broadcast tools increasingly allow ordinary people to publish and distribute their own news and begin redirecting information flows. The elites are terrified of this “mass amateuration” of broadcasting. The mass layoffs of journalists and the frantic fears of politicians who never know when a swarm of people might go on the attack are two recent examples of this erosion of the power of the “professional classes.”
5. Cheapness and ease of tools: Social movement organizations have been perennially under-resourced, and with the current financial crisis and global recession the situation will surely worsen. But with the advent of web-enabled mobile phones and $300 computers, cutting-edge communication tools are becoming cheaper and more powerful, and as a result, are quickly leveling the technological playing field. In South Africa, for example, even though Internet penetration remains at around 10 percent, mobile phone penetration sits at 98.5 percent.
Social networking tools are also becoming easier to use. Just in the past two years, people with little technical ability are now able to create websites, Facebook pages, YouTube videos, etc. We’re drawing closer to the point where the majority of online tools are so simple that technical experts are beginning to fade into the background. The web is no longer the exclusive dominion of the young and highly educated, and as this trend continues it will allow social movements to cheaply and easily reach out to increasingly diverse constituencies.
Now take that from the point of view of the small business owner: cheap methods of promoting products and services in an interactive manner, while being able to organize into networks with other small businesses in order to cross-promote, as past hierarchies within the business community begin to erode? That sounds like something worth investigating… Read Full Post »
Posted By Michael D'Elicio / 15th January 2009
I have been putting off this first blog entry for some time now. There has been so much to be done – what with starting a new business, talking to new clients, and doing the work required for their sites – that taking the time to sit down to write what I envisioned would be a kind of mission statement to set the tone for the rest of the blog seemed like more of a chore than something to jump at with alacrity. But as my father always said: “The perfect is the enemy of good.” Actually, Voltaire said it first. But my father speaks a little bit of French as well, and I bet Voltaire didn’t ride his bike anywhere near as much as Dad does, so we’ll call this one a draw.
Another event had a larger role in inspiring me to get to work on this blog. Last night, I attended an open forum at the Greenburgh Nature Center in Scarsdale, NY, of small business owners who were going “green”: i.e. reducing their ecological footprint for both ethical and financial reasons. It turns out that going green was improving their bottom line, and enhancing their public image. Turns out that going green is also good branding.
For some time, I have been quite taken with the idea of sustainability – that is, environments which limit their usage of resources and remain largely self-sufficient – and the importance of small businesses in fostering a sustainable economy. I first started researching this topic about eight years ago, when the internet was making headlines but was still too young and esoteric for most mom-and-pop stores to consider anything more than a glorified Yellow Page ad as their web presence. At that time, my interest lay more in sustainable design – creating mixes of residential, commercial, and public spaces for optimal efficiency, health, and quality of living standards – but I intuitively felt that the internet could play some role.
Friends of mine in Austin, Texas, where I lived, were heavily into Mexican fair-trade activism, during the time of the massive university strikes and general discontent that ensued in Mexican cities following the IMF recommendations after the US bail-out of the Mexican government. We decided to take a trip down to Oaxaca, to see for ourselves some of the living conditions of the Mayan, Mixe, Mixteco, and other native peoples of the area. They were predictably squalid.
What I did not know was that the indigenous people were fantastic artisans, and crafted what is known as Oaxacan black pottery. They sell for cheap down south, but in America, they go for a pretty penny. Someone was obviously buying the pottery low and selling high, and it wasn’t a local. We quickly realized that if the Oaxacan people we got to know had had e-commerce sites pumping that mark-up directly into their coffers instead of a middle man’s, they might have been able to weather the economic upheaval that took place post-NAFTA, and our national immigration conversation might be very different today.
Since that time, I’ve worked as a marketer promoting small businesses, and I still feel that same intuitive sense that the internet has the most to offer the people I represent. There are no “big” websites or “little” websites – just quality websites and shoddy ones, just easily-found sites and invisible ones. A single blogger can get as many hits a day as the New York Times. A college student can start an online facebook that dominates the social networking market. The web has the potential to radically democratize capitalism, and it’s been my experience over and over that it rewards a job well done. The cooler you are, the more the internet likes you.
At the forum I was at last night, the mayor of Irvington, New York, Nicola Coddington, spoke of creating a network of these small businesses moving in a greener direction in order to sustain the town, and a greater network of the townships in Westchester County. She had every part down; she just needed the mechanism.
Folks, the mechanism is here. You’re on it right now. You can click on any of the links I’ve put up, and check out any of the resources I’ve mentioned. For those of you interested in some of the events that took place in Mexico, you can visit here or here. Everything is parallel here in cyberspace. We stand on “more equal” ground.
And so while our business continues to be promoting small businesses via internet marketing, SEO, and social networking, this blog is to be a space for discussion and resources on creating sustainable zones that we all want to live in – clean, walkable, diverse, vibrant, unique – and how we can use the internet to promote local economies as a vital component of such zones. We will promote any organization or business looking to contribute to the greater end of sustainability, and we invite suggestions, comments, and links at all times. We want to work with our local community offline, and our global community online.
Like anything worth doing, this is going to take a lot of time and effort. We’re aiming for perfect. Voltaire be damned.
