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5 Ways to Nail Your Content

Kylie Fennell

Online and social media content continues to be a major challenge for small business marketing.

The biggest obstacles are lack of time and expertise – not knowing what makes good content, so here are my 5 top tips for nailing your content.

1. Identify and subscribe to great content

Take the time to do a bit of research online of what content is popular or routinely shared on social media. You can get a feel for this by looking at your own social media accounts and people who like your pages. What content and pages do they like? Go and like or follow the same pages or accounts and then you will have similar content come straight into your feed, which you can share later on.

You can also google key topics and find popular blogs or news sites and then subscribe to them. You can also use the free versions of tools like buzzsumo.com to search for the most shared content.

You can try bloglovin.com that allows you to search for and subscribe to popular blogs and sites from one dashboard and will send you an update email of any new posts.

2. Look outside of the box

Be prepared to consider content outside of your immediate subject area. Content is useful if it’s of interest to your ideal customers and target market. If you run a childcare business, your customers are likely to mums, so think about what kind of content interests mums. Your content doesn’t just have to be about childcare.

Below is a table showing the four elements that makes content go viral. Consider these when selecting your content.

Source: buzzsumo.com

3. Schedule!

Schedule has two meanings. You should schedule yourself up to 1 hour a week to sit down to select your proactive social media content and then you schedule it in a free tool such as www.hootsuite.com or www.buffer.com where you can post your content in advance for usually up to 5 social media accounts all from the one place.

4. Mix it up

Choose a variety of content. Some designed to entertain, some designed to inform, some to reward.

Use images, videos as well as informative longer content pieces (or link to these).

5. Monitor and evaluate

Always check your analytics such as those built-in to Facebook or those offered by hootsuite or buffer.

What posts are most popular? What time of day is best to post for your audience? Who are you reaching?

Check out this post to find out more on how to write brilliant social media content. For expert marketing advice go to www.kyliefennell.com

 

The cheapest and most effective way to get more customers

Kylie Fennell

Almost every business I’ve come across has one goal when it comes to marketing – get more customers.

Businesses may spend their marketing dollars on advertising, updating a website or brochures, all with varying results.

The reality is that the cheapest and most effective way to get more customers is often overlooked.

What I’m talking about is word-of-mouth marketing, specifically referrals.

According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising.

So why aren’t more businesses tapping into their existing or past customer network or spending more time nurturing key influencers and decision makers?

Word-of-mouth is the ultimate weapon for all businesses – retail, professional services, it doesn’t matter.

Here are my top tips for nurturing your clients, customers and influencers and encouraging referrals.

  1. Your number 1 communication platform for word-of-mouth marketing is social media.
  2. Reward people – offer loyalty programs, value adding services and referral incentives
  3. Ask for feedback
  4. Ask for case studies or testimonials
  5. Stay in touch – try and stay front of mind by providing useful information or organise casual catch-ups
  6. Use personalised notes, cards and calls as well as thank you notes and even birthday cards (if they happily provided their birthday details) – preferably handwritten and signed personally.
  7. DOING WHAT YOU’LL SAY YOU’LL DO is probably the best way to nurture your customers
  8. NEVER underestimate the importance and effectiveness of nurturing your existing networks.
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How Not to Throw Your Money Away on Sponsorships

Kylie Fennell

Small businesses are often approached by organisations for sponsorship.

Whether it’s the local footy club, a school or the CWA (Country Women’s Association), there’s no shortage of worthy causes that could use sponsorship and will ask you for money.

It’s really difficult and time consuming for small businesses to decide what they should or shouldn’t sponsor – and then getting the most out of their sponsorship.

Here are some basic guidelines for how not to throw your money away on sponsorships and how to identify partnerships that will actually support your business growth. We will refer to sponsorship as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities.

Why bother with CSR or sponsorship?

CSR initiatives through sponsorship, financial and in-kind support can encourage:
• Brand awareness
• Employee engagement
• Lead generation
• Reputation as a good corporate citizen
• Customer loyalty
• Differentiate yourself from your competitors
• Generate innovation and learning and enhance your influence
• Improve your business reputation and standing
• Provide access to investment and funding opportunities
• Generate positive publicity and media opportunities
• Enhanced relationships with customers, suppliers and networks
• Tax benefits.

CSR guiding principles

Generally speaking smalls businesses should sponsor initiatives and events that support the following principles:

• Target market reach – will it reach a significant proportion of your ideal customers, influencers and/or stakeholders?

• Cultural fit – does the organisation have similar values and fit nicely with your culture?

AND/OR

• Community – is it relevant to your target region and community and does it give back to the community?


Assessing a CSR initiative

When considering sponsorship, consider these questions:
• Does it align with your business’s goals and strategic priorities?
• Does it make sense to your business?
• Does it support your values?
• By being a sponsor are you likely to reach more of your ideal customer, key influencers and stakeholders?
• Do you have enough information about the organisation/event/proposal? Timeframes? Cost? Benefits? Risks?
• How will you be acknowledged?
• How does it contribute to your marketing goals?
• How will you measure its success?
• How could you leverage it?
• Who else is sponsoring?
• Who will be managing it and assessing it before, during and after? Will you need additional resources to manage your role in the sponsorship?

You should always seek in return for your involvement:
• Branding opportunities
• Speaking opportunities
• Opportunities to provide and/or personally give out collateral and promotional items
• Social media promotion
Opportunity for your employees to be involved – perhaps volunteer for the event or program
• Access to or an opportunity to provide special offer information to the sponsor recipient’s database.

You may like to nominate a charity of choice for the year and then allocate a budget for remaining community based requests you may receive the remainder of the year.

You can also develop a checklist or guidelines based on the above that can be made available on your website for people seeking sponsorship. Having a set template and publicising the guidelines may reduce the number of inappropriate submissions.

At the end of the day, CSR is important but it should be a win-win for the business as well as the organisation sponsored.

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Disrupt me! 5 things you need to know about disruptive marketing

Kylie Fennell

One business term or trend that’s just not going away any time soon is: Disruptive Marketing.

You’ve probably heard of it but maybe you’re not really sure what it means, or how you can use it in your marketing. Well here are 5 things you need to know to get disruptive.

1. What is disruptive marketing?

Disruptive marketing refers to the communication activities and messages that either challenge the conventional thinking in an existing market or speak to a new one.

It’s the complete opposite of traditional ‘interruption’ style marketing. Interruption or traditional marketing interrupts the daily life of a consumer via TV ads, billboards, commercials and such, while disruption marketing disrupts traditional marketing strategies by being so compelling that the consumer doesn’t feel like they’ve been disrupted by marketing or advertising at all.

In fact they’re grateful that they have been shown or offered something of interest to them.

It could be as simple as ‘non-advertising’ stunts or content that goes viral because it is just plain interesting and engaging eg. the Red Bull Stratos jump from space.

The term disruptive marketing is often used in tandem with a disruptive business model. This is where a company creates a product or service to match the demand of an emerging market, or re-designs an existing product or service to meet a need that’s currently not being fulfilled satisfactorily – thus disrupting and possible displacing existing market leaders.

One of the biggest poster childs for disruptive innovation and marketing is Uber. Uber doesn’t use much traditional advertising to market their model, yet they get plenty of promotion via free editorial in news stories about their ‘disruptive model’ and have used disruptive campaigns such as their cat delivery service where they delivered adoptable kittens for 15 minutes of snuggle time.

2. Small business can do it too

You could associate yourself with an important cause (hopefully that reflects the values of your business). Uber introduced its cat delivery service to coincide with Pet Adoption Day.

When you do this, your association with the cause becomes the focus rather than selling – suddenly you become a lot less interruptive and more shareable.

3. Revisit your target market or segments

Remember a key part of disruptive marketing and innovation is reaching an emerging or new market, perhaps a market segment that isn’t having its needs fulfilled.

Revisit your target audience to see if you could refine your messaging or target a new market segment.

4. Refine your products or services

Can you create or refine your products or services to meet an emerging or unfilled need.

Apple’s introduction of the iPhone, and the iPad are great examples of disruptive innovation.

You may not be able to adopt disruption on such a grand scale but let’s say you’re a small food or grocer store. Could you introduce a drive through option to ring ahead and pick up a couple of items such as bread and milk? I can’t keep count of the number times I’ve had my toddler or baby in the car and they were asleep or I just couldn’t bear getting them in and out of the car one more time, just to get a loaf of bread.

5.  Don’t wait to BE disrupted

You need to be the one doing the disrupting, instead of waiting to be disrupted by a competitor.

Keep an eye on your competition and listen to your customers for ideas on how you can connect with them and meet their needs in new ways.

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The 5 Biggest Marketing Mistakes Small Businesses Make

Kylie Fennell
Usually I write about all the things you can do to improve you small business marketing, but today I want to approach it from a different angle.
 
I’ve been doing this marketing gig for longer than I’d care to admit, which gives me great insight into what some small businesses are doing wrong when it comes to marketing.
 
So here it is, the top 5 biggest mistakes small businesses make when it comes to marketing and how to avoid them.
 
1. Unclear about what makes you unique
 
One of the very first things that must be done but is often overlooked is defining your unique selling point. What makes you so different that someone would choose you over the competition.
 
You need to do this right. Get yourself a positioning or brand story and make sure it is reflected throughout all of your branding, taglines and communication.
 
2. Marketing to everyone
 
All too often I’ve asked a client “who’s your target market?” and they’ve replied earnestly “everyone really”. 
 
You physically and financially can not market to everyone and more importantly you shouldn’t even try. 
 
The facts are your products and services are not going to appeal to everyone, and even if you do attract a wide market, ask yourself if they represent the type of customers you want.
 
Are they the right kind of customers? Read this post to figure out how to better identify your target market – which trust me makes the actually marketing process a heck of a lot easier.
3. Getting online and social media wrong
This covers off on quite a few items but the most common mistakes in this category are:
  • Not having a website because you don’t sell online – the facts are people will look for you online, so you need to be found. This can be kept simple though. Read these small business website tips. Your website also needs to be responsive so it can be used easily on tablets and mobiles.
  • Not doing social media – the biggest complaints I get are I don’t know how to do social media or “it’s a waste of time, as I haven’t got any sales out of it”. Don’t let social media overwhelm you – it’s possible to do it yourself quite easily. However have realistic expectations. Social media is about connecting with people. Taking this view is like when meeting someone at a party and when they ask “what do you do?”, you say “I’m only going to tell you if you want to buy from me”. Worse still, you may have spent 30 minutes boring them about your business without asking the other person a single question. Social media is the biggest cocktail party, your business will ever attend.
  • Trying to do too much – you should only be active on the social media platforms relevant to your target audience and the ones you can maintain a presence on regularly. It needs to be sustainable, so don’t try to be on every platform.
4. Ignoring your customers
Unfortunately many business owners think they know what’s best for their customers.
If you respond to them respectfully and in a timely manner, they’ll forgive you when you do get things wrong.
Finally, go that extra mile for them, and it will likely result in more sales.
The cheapest marketing you can do is to nurture your existing customers, as this is more likely to result in repeat business and referrals.
5. Not marketing
 
Many businesses make the mistake of not marketing at all.
They say things like, “but it doesn’t work”. My answer to this is “well you musn’t be doing it right”.
Start with a good strategy and stick to it. Remember to monitor and evaluate your activities. Continue doing what works, but stop doing things that don’t work.
The biggest reason though many small businesses aren’t marketing though is because they say they can’t afford it.
There are plenty of low cost and effective ways you can market your business and it’s possible to do much of it yourself.

Let’s Break The Rules (of Marketing)

Kylie Fennell
If you’ve been doing the marketing thing for a while now and you are starting to get the hang of it, then it’s time to throw out the rule book.
New rules. Old rules. It doesn’t matter. It’s time to break them.
This doesn’t mean forgetting the fundamentals or the foundations of marketing – it means using what you know, to try something different.
If you want to stand out in this noisy world then you’re going to need to adapt what you know – bend the rules sometimes; break them other times.
Why you ask?
Because everyone has caught onto our marketing tricks. Our beloved audience is as learned as we are when it comes to the most used marketing tactics and frankly…they’re over it.
How do I know this?
Simple, because I’m a consumer too and every time I hand over my email address I cringe, because I can see the automated email series coming before it even starts to clog up my inbox.
Do you overflow with happiness every time you receive a “special offer” email or text from a marketer? Do you love those pop-up boxes on websites that so kindly interrupted what you were trying to read?
I know I don’t. So why do we persist with putting our customers through the same worn out marketing tactics.
Unless you’re at the cutting edge of marketing or have the good fortune of starting your own marketing trend – then the facts are, that by the time you’re on to a new tactic, so is everyone else.
Now I’m not saying automated emails and pop-up boxes or any other marketing tactic is bad. They’re not bad, especially if they’re working for you.
I am saying, if the tried and tested tactics aren’t working for you, then STOP DOING THEM.
Try something new.
Here are a few examples:
  • Try three key messages rather than sales scripts
  • Solve a problem rather than selling how good you are
  • Try snail mail instead of email for direct marketing.

Finally, offer free content such as videos, ebooks or guides without asking for an email address – give them the option. If they really love your stuff, they’ll want to subscribe and won’t just delete your emails. Go for quality over quantity when it comes to email lists and the emails themselves.

At the end of the day do what feels right for you and your target audience. Monitor what works and what doesn’t.
Filter what you initially think you want to share online or via email and focus on being indispensable to your audience and not wearing them out with tactics that have been done to death.
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Stop the rot! Why we need to use ‘real’ words

Kylie Fennell

I have an important message for you.

As a leader in my field, and as part of my ongoing commitment to best practice, innovation and sustainability, I constantly strive to generate evocative statements that inspire and empower my stakeholders to achieve and exceed their expectations and bring their overarching vision, mission, goals and objectives into critical alignment, while ensuring operational and strategic methodologies are in synergy.

OR I could have said…

I use words that speak to my audience.

Yep, this post is about Weasel Words, Motherhood Statements, Corporate Speak, Buzzwords – or we could call it what it really is…WORD ROT…or in the spirit of this blog…a steaming pile of excrement from an intact adult male of the species Bos Taurus.

Like Wood Rot eats aways at the structure and foundations of a home, Word Rot eats away at the meaning of our words, destroying the integrity of our statements.

I call on all corporates, business owners, marketers, actually everyone to have their rot detector on high alert when writing.

Forget corporate speak – you need to write and speak like you mean it, write like it’s a real conversation, speak to your audience, and mean what you say.

Our audiences are smart people and trust me can read through the rot – if you want cut through in your writing…it’s simple, stop the rot!

Here are my Top 10 Tips to Stop the Rot

1. Are you saying something, or a lot, without actually saying anything?

2. Is your statement vague or non-commital? eg. It is said by experts that…

3. Are you using buzzwords because you think you should? eg. We’re committed to innovation and sustainability

4. Are you making vague generalisations?

5. Is it hard to understand the meaning?

6. Are you making commitments or claims with no evidence? eg. We’re an Employer of Choice

7. Are you using weak verbs or action words? eg. ‘strive to’, instead of ‘will’

8. Are you trying to bamboozle the audience?

9. Are you being misleading or ambiguous? eg. replacing ‘firing staff’ with ‘streamlining the workforce’

10. Have you chosen words or a phrase because you think it’s a popular sentiment? eg. Our employees are our number one priority.

AND BONUS ROT DETECTOR TEST…

Could you put all the words you used in almost any order and they still make sense? If you answered yes, you have some A-grade rot on your hands there my friend.

Now for a bit of fun…here is a corporate speak generator where you can turn words like: ‘vision’ into ‘enthusiastically e-enable an expanded array of infrastructures’ and ‘innovation’ into ‘dramatically empower B2C synergy’.

If you need help stopping the rot, get in touch with me via www.kyliefennell.com or check out my post on choosing the right words for marketing.

The Art of Asking Questions – 5 simple sales tips

Kylie Fennell
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/freedigitalimages.net

Would you mind if I asked you a question?

Do you want to know how to get more sales?

Can you do me a favour?…great just read a little further.

There is an art to asking questions in marketing that can make a big difference to your sales.

A lot of business owners or employees may say “I’m not good at sales” or “I don’t like being pushy”, even “I don’t want to sound too salesy”.

These statements resonate with me, as I have never liked the traditional ‘sales pitches’ but I’m here to tell you, it’s possible to improve your sales by just asking the right questions in the right way.

You will see from how I opened this blog post some examples of what I mean.

1. Ask if you can ask

When you come into contact with a prospect, it’s usually in the form of a general enquiry eg. How much is….? What’s included in….?. You helpfully answer their questions and they say “thanks very much and I’ll think about it” before walking out, hanging up the phone or ending the email conversation.

But what if at that point you asked them “Would you mind if I asked you a question?”.

Nine times out of 10 the prospect will say, “no I don’t mind”. They’ve given you permission to continue the dialogue. They may in fact be just doing it out of politeness but by doing this they’re actually providing an opportunity to hear answers to the questions they haven’t asked.

So you then can start with something like:

“Could you tell me why you rang/email/came into our store today, what was the problem you needed solving?”. Then “tell me more about that”.

Dig, dig to find out more about their exact problem and needs and use it as an opener to provide a LOT MORE helpful information that can take you closer to a sale.

2. Ask for a favour

This is similar to ‘asking if you can ask’ but more specifically you’re asking “Can you do me a favour?”.

Once again nine times out of 10 the prospect is most likely to be a little perplexed but is inclined to say ‘Yes’ as most of us by nature want to be helpful.

You may not even wait for a response, you may go straight from “Can you do me a favour?” to “Could you tell me why you rang/email/came into our store today, what was the problem you needed solving?”. Then “tell me more about that”.

3. Make the assumption

Asking for permission when you want to ask more questions or you want a favour makes sense, but don’t ask for permission when it comes to your call to action. Assume that they want to proceed.

So let’s say for example your call to action is book an appointment – don’t ask “Would you like to book an appointment”, instead ask “What days suit you best to come in for an appointment”.

Here are some examples of making an assumption when it comes to a call to action.

What’s the best address to send some more information to?
When would be a good time for you to book in…?
What day would suit you for….?

4. Ask a question that elicits a ‘Yes’

Try not to ask questions that elicit a no response. Yes is a much more positive word and while the difference in the question can be subtle it can make a great difference.

Eg. A gym might say “Are you ready for summer?” with the expected answer being ‘no’. This could be changed to “Do you want to be ready for summer?”; or “Do you have enough customers?” vs “Do you want more customers?”. You should also use loads of positive language.

5. But why?

Stuck for a question to ask when speaking to a prospect? then start with “why?”.

I remember seeing an interview a few years back with a celebrated Australian journalist and he said the only question he ever needed over the years was ‘Why?’. As a former journalist this really resonated with me.

Like an annoying 5-year-old – trust me I know this – “but why” is the most powerful question.

Ask a prospect, “why is that?”, “why did you…”, “why today?” or even “why not?”.

“Why” is the most powerful open ended question in existence.

So do you want to know more about how to improve your sales – go to www.kyliefennell.com. You can also check out my Sensational Sales Techniques blog post.

Delivering on your brand – when little things become BIG things

Kylie Fennell

Never underestimate the effect the little things can have on your business and your brand.

As a marketer I talk a lot about living up to your brand promise.

I strongly believe that no amount of advertising, promotion or social media content will help you get or keep customers if other parts of your business are letting your brand promise down.

So what do I mean by brand promise?

Brand promise often starts with the words you use to describe your business and its unique selling proposition or point of difference.

This brand promise is often reflected in a tagline or slogan. To give you an example, I know a real estate agent whose tagline (and by default his brand promise) is something like ‘excellence in customer service’.

While it’s not the most unique or powerful tagline, it’s not a disaster…except for the fact that my personal experience dealing with that agent led me to believe he had terrible customer service.

The short version is that we had put a signed contract in to buy a property listed with him and waited to hear back with the vendor’s response – we never heard back.

On contacting him he advised us he actually accepted a contract from another buyer (for a similar amount we were offering) and hadn’t bothered coming back to us for further negotiation. Ethically it’s very questionable, but more to the point, he did not live up to his brand promise.

Brand promise goes further than the tagline. The reality is that everything you and your ‘business’ does and represents contributes to how your brand is perceived and whether people want to buy from you.

To illustrate my point let’s use a fictional widget store and assume you’re in the market to buy a particular widget. So you type into google the widget name and your city and you find a stockist, but its 50km away.

You click on their website and confirm they sell that widget – you need this widget desperately so you ring the number listed to check if it’s in stock before driving to the store.

The number goes to a recording where you are prompted to press 1 for X and 2 for Y or hold to be transferred to a helpful team member. You are kept on hold for 10 minutes, listening to bad piped music before being transferred to an outsourced call centre overseas.

The person you speak to is very friendly, though a little hard to understand. They tell you they can’t access the inventory for the store so will transfer you to the store manager. You’re on hold again for another 10 minutes before you’re accidentally cut off.

You give up on the phone call and figure you’ll drive out to the store anyway. It’s 8am on a Wednesday and you have to bundle up the kids in the car (master 2 and miss 4) but you really need that widget. You try to double check the opening hours online but the hours aren’t listed.

You drive to the store and discover there’s no parking nearby. You and the kids have to walk a few blocks before getting to the store and finding out that they don’t open until 10am on a Wednesday (it’s just gone 9am).

You really need that widget so you and the kids sit down outside the grimy looking front door. It’s the height of summer and everyone is hot.

Finally a pimply 16 year old turns up at 10.05am barely gives you a nod and unlocks the store.

You go inside the store only to be told that the air conditioner is on the blink. You enquire about the widget but the retail assistant shrugs and says he’ll have to check the computer and it will take at least 10 minutes for the system to boot.

You go and look for the widget yourself but the aisles aren’t labelled and you feel like you’re looking for a needle in a haystack. You finally find where they should be on the shelf but notice that there’s none left.

The retail assistant finally gets onto the system and tells you that the widgets are on order and were supposed to be in yesterday but haven’t arrived yet. He’s unable to give you an estimated delivery date.

When pushed he tells you that they are actually at the distribution centre, which happens to be in your home suburb. You ask whether you can pay for the widget now and pick it up from the distribution centre. He says “no that’s against policy and it has to be delivered to the store first”.

You ask whether you can pay an additional charge for it to be delivered instead to your house, and you guessed it, he says “No that’s against store policy”. You ask him to check with the store manager and he says you have to send an email via the Contact Us form on the website.

You walk out of the store in disgust; screaming, hot, tired and hungry kids in tow and no closer to getting your widget.

So how are you feeling about this organisation and brand? I suspect you wouldn’t be a fan.

Now you might think that my story is far fetched…it’s not…I personally have experienced nearly all of this on one day at a multinational store. That being said, it only takes one or two of these missteps to damage your brand.

Whether it’s your website, hotline, parking, cleaning, customer service, point of sale system, air conditioning, punctionality – every single one of them presents an opportunity to enhance or damage your brand – every one of them is a moment of truth for your business.

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