Reflections? No time for that!

It’s almost my blog-o-versary… I started this blog on July 23, 2009. I have seen many-a-reflection post from other bloggers about their first year, or their fifth, for the ones who’ve been around a while. And this isn’t one of those posts. Mainly because I’m not one to do a lot of looking back… when you (or I) screw up, we need to absorb those lessons where we are and then move forward. Take the time you need to feel the pain and then, Just. Move. On.

So, in the spirit of moving on…

I’ll continue to write about relevance, digital convergence and future trends that connect people to other people, places, spaces and ideas, because that seemed to resonate with many of you who took the time to comment on a post or retweet it.

I’ll ramp up my posting frequency. Yes, yes I will. Even if it’s a short post… if it’s relevant to this blog, I’ll get it up here more quickly.

I’ll use Twitter more strategically to gather ideas, feedback and take the temperature of the audiences out there. Little less arrogance, little more serving the readership.

I’ll continue to tweak the blog and the site to better serve the readers… sharing integrated marketing insights, strategies, tips and foibles, seasoned with my Tulsa perspective. I’ll include public relations content more frequently and I’ll be inviting guest bloggers to post this year. I use this blog as my front door… people hire me because they want help thinking about, strategizing and implementing integrated marketing solutions. They want -need- to know how I think… and I want to attract potential partners, clients and build relationships with others who get, or at least are intrigued by, how I think and who see the value in relationships and connectivity. I want to connect with people out there who will challenge what I think, who will share what they think, who will help me grow and bring all of their goodness to bear on this blog and community we’re building.

So as I said… Reflection doesn’t suit me, but red does… and we’re going full-on, redlined into the future here, and I hope you’ll not only come along for the ride, but help build the engine.

Photo Credit: flickr user becksshaw

Planning for Recovery?

Some economic indicators are finally showing movement in the positive direction. As I posted last week, I am seeing this in my business, as well. I don’t typically see it until clients (and potential clients) begin to see it in their businesses and respond by thinking about growth, expansion, driving new business, etc. I’m not an economist (and aren’t we all glad for that!) but I can definitively say the businesses I’m dealing with on a daily basis have new energy and purpose in their planning.

And that’s all good, right? Yes… unless you’re a business who spent the past two years curled up in a figurative fetal position, thinking only of short-term survival. If that’s the case, your recovery process is going to be much harder. Here are some issues I’m seeing:

1. Shrunken Customer Base > While most people engaged in less discretionary spending during the depression, they didn’t stop thinking about what they’d like to buy, have, or do during that time. But those businesses who stopped reminding their hiatus customers of their ability to fulfill those desires have lost significant top-of-mind ground as people begin to slowly open up their wallets again.

2. Reduced Ability to Serve > Layoffs and reductions have been part of the fabric of business for the past 18 months. Companies who’ve cut too deeply or dropped service or product lines may struggle as customers return. Training new quality people takes time, and training customers to love a different product or service does, too.

3. Bunker Mentality > Just as some of the shifts in consumer behavior are likely to be long-lasting, business owners are struggling with planning for growth again. Too long in the mind set of survival can limit big-picture thinking, visionary ideas and innovation. Some businesses are finding it hard to take risks again, and while understandable, this bunker mentality will stifle growth.

What to do?

Every business is different, but the key to starting a recovery plan is to, well… START. Don’t assume you can just go back to doing what you did before “all this” and prosperity will return. If you’re waiting for the right time to begin marketing to your customers, or planning for the next season’s offerings, or considering your hiring needs… you’re already behind.

Examine your business: How much of your previous customer base is still with you? At what level? What are they buying now and why? Do they have new needs/desires? Where is your profit? Where do you excel? Where can you grow? What challenges are you facing from a staffing, resource and marketing perspective?

The depth and breadth of the depression caught many businesses off guard, mine included. Don’t let the recovery surprise you, too.

flickr image credit juhansonin

Go for WHY: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oberazzi/318947873/

List posts have their place, and I know they are good for traffic. I’ve written them, too. But our super-connected world and the constant flow of information seems to be driving us to oversimplify complex subjects and interactions. By creating lists. Lots of lists. In some cases, lists of lists.
I’m not against all lists… I believe in a to-do list, a grocery list and have tweeted & retweeted helpful design tip, font and how-to lists. But not all things can (or should) be reduced to a bulleted list.

If it’s a complex subject, treat it with the depth it deserves. A marketing communications plan, encompassing goals, objectives, strategies, tactics and metrics should be more than a list of items. A public relations plan should be more than a list of ideas or publications and an editorial calendar. When we start to work with a new client we ask a lot of questions about their business… not just about what they sell and who they sell it to, but about things like:

Where does your money come from? Revenue? Profit streams and margins?

What is the recent history of the market segment you inhabit? Near future changes or evolutions you expect? Long-term future or potential?

Adjacent markets? Competitive markets?

What factors in the market and within your company’s revenue map do you control or influence?

We augment with our own research and then we tackle goals and objectives, clearly grounded in the business case for what we’re doing. The marketing communications plan addresses how the goals and objectives fit the larger picture of the business and where it wants or needs to go. When you start with a good WHY, all the WHATs and HOWs become much easier to define and later on to sell to the people who have to sign the checks to see them implemented.

By now, you’ve completed all the steps in part 1 (previous post) and have a mountain of data…. random bits of impersonal knowledge. Next, we need to add some human insight to the data, season with some business sense and a dash of intuition and we’ll develop actionable information.

Talk to your customers. Especially your best ones. I don’t like lengthy, impersonal surveys for this. Customers are valuable and you should treat them (and their time) as such. Call up, go see, take out to lunch (depending on your business) your best customers and just ask them why they do business with you. Tell them you’re in the middle of trying to quantify who you are as a brand and that you value their opinion. In fact, you’d love to find more customers just like them. Ask them how they’d describe your company to someone looking for the service you offer (if they were selling your company to a connection, what would they say or do?) Encourage honesty… and look for telling information. Do you have a web site, but your customers don’t think of that as a way to tell people about you? If not… then perhaps how they think of your business isn’t reflected well on the web site. This happens when you THINK your market position and brand image are all about (A), and (A) is splashed all over your site (or brochures) but the perception in the marketplace is really (B).

Talk to your employees. Ask them how they describe who they work for… how they characterize your company. Ask them why they think customers buy from you. Don’t just ask your sales or marketing people. At one company, one of the guys out on the shop floor showed us a nondescript (to me) metal part. “These,” he said. “We use these. No one else does. At least, not in their regular line product.” I asked for some clarification… and found out that the company routinely uses a metal part two grades better than specs require in this particular product. It fails less often than comparably priced products. And this part shows in the product exterior. I talked further with sales, service, dealers…

The company was (attempting) selling itself on service… how they took care of customers and any problems that happened. Their service WAS good. But the real selling point, the reason customers recommended their products to other people, was that part. It meant (to the marketplace of people who actually USED the product daily) something to see that quality… though every part and bolt isn’t an upgraded version and the customers knew it. The product was a quality piece through and through, even so.

In their marketplace, long-lived equipment mounted to your truck was a badge of honor. Toughness and all that. Their peers could see the quality of their equipment and their investment… and that meant something to this market. Owning this brand meant you cared about how you did your job.

Service is great and all, but it’s even better to not need to call because the thing doesn’t break.

So the company’s web site, stuffed with service messages, and brochures with maps of authorized service locations, etc., weren’t helping their front line sales force (their current customers) sell. They needed to step back, go through the brand audit process and align their public messaging and touchpoints with what the marketplace told them was true… And arm their sales force, their employees and their customers with the right tools and information to share the message that toughness mattered.

So… now you are ready to sit down with the data from part 1 and the human insights from part 2. Really think about what all that stuff can tell you. Even if at this point you decide you want professional help or insight (let me know), you’ve already done a great deal of work and saved that time, effort and dollars. If you’re game to tackle it yourself, just remember that sometimes the biggest insight comes from the smallest details. Be not afraid.

This is the first in a series of posts about how Small Businesses can perform a Do-It-Yourself brand audit.

Overheard:

“You can’t embark on any new marketing until you’ve had a brand audit done!”

“I don’t even know what that is… seriously.”

“You hire a marketing firm or ad agency and they come in and tell you how people see you brand.”

“You mean, what they think of my logo and my ads?”

“Yeah, and then what you need to do to meet your goals.”

Assumptions (before you read further): You understand that your brand and your logo are NOT the same thing. You understand that while advertising is a form of marketing, all marketing is not advertising. And that branding is more (much more) than either one of them.

A brand audit is a good idea for all businesses, but unless you have many locations, lots of employees, multiple campaigns across multiple channels… you can do at least a preliminary one on your own. Here’s how:

Accept that you’ve made mistakes - begin with the attitude that you will discover some things about your brand and company that might be painful. Decide (now) that this is a voyage of discovery and the end result will be a stronger, better-positioned company.

Map your touchpoints - Every way you interact with your customers and every place you attempt to influence them. Obvious ones include ads (yellow pages? online? TV? newspaper? Football booster poster?) and brochures. Less obvious ones might include the signage on your company van, envelopes, invoices, how the phone is answered, what your front door looks like, employee uniforms/appearances, online presence, community involvement… Really think about this. It doesn’t matter what the INTENT was (ad on the football booster program to support the program, not to gain customers). If it does or potentially could touch your customers or prospects, include it. Visuals work well here (take a snapshot of your front door, your van, one of your employees on the job, etc.). Ask your employees to help you think of ways you touch customers that might be out of the ordinary.

Gather some opinion - If you aren’t tech-savvy, a friend who knows how to help you set up Google alerts, search social networks and generally do some listening is really helpful for this part. If you are interweb-friendly, take a look around the web. What are people saying on sites like Yelp, Epinions and CitySearch? Look up what local sites have to say about you… if you’re a dentist, for instance, search for common phrases like, “dentist in [your community]” to see what’s being said, on what sites. Many sites exist out there purporting to be “portals” for people to find information on services (like dentists) but really are just scraping the web, listing what they find, and making money off of serving Google ads (for dentists, teeth whitening, etc.) when people visit the “listings page.” If inaccurate info is out there (wrong phone numbers, work hours, specialties, etc.) then try to get it updated or changed.

Gather your financials, invoices, etc. - You need to know where your money comes from… and from whom. Where does the profit in your business really live? Many businesses we’ve worked with have started the audit process telling us they want to move their brand to “x” but when we delve into this part… their money, lifeblood, where people trust and connect with them, is “y.” Unless there’s a very, very good reason, trying to change y to x is a difficult (at best) and disastrous (at worst) proposition. A better one is to see where in the y space you can expand, improve or illuminate new markets.

This is a good time of year to begin an audit process… you’re dealing with your end-of-the-year financials anyway, and most businesses are thinking about next year’s marketing initiatives.

In the next post in this series, we’ll be talking about what to DO with all this fabulous info you’ve gathered. If you think of/know of other types of info you think would be relevant to beginning a brand audit, please share them in the comments. Also… have you been through an audit? Good outcome? Bad outcome? Please share!

Image credit from Flikr user tiffanyday

I’ve been thinking about Shannon Paul’s post, Is Social Media a Strategy or a Tactic? for a while now. I decided it was time to crystallize some of my thoughts. And, of course, share them with you:

FIRST: Forget the debate over whether Social Media is a strategy or a tactic. We (practioners) tend to spend a lot of time arguing this point. Why? If the answer to this question changes the implementation, then it matters. If it doesn’t, well, then it doesn’t.

Where to start, then, if not with the debate over strategy and tactics? How about starting where all good marketing needs to start? With a killer communications plan.

That communications plan must start with a goal – WHAT we are trying to accomplish.
One goal, please, per plan… and it must be measurable. “Increase sales” is not a goal. “Increase sales by 10%” is a goal. Maybe not a very inspiring one, but a concrete goal, nonetheless. Not starting with a true goal is where most plans go awry. All the deep theory, latest tactics, and slick strategies will not accomplish your goal if you don’t know what it is. Not without a truckload of blind luck, anyway.

Let’s tackle this one: “Grow our online business by 25%.”

Then, define the objectives for the goal – WHY we care about WHAT we are trying to accomplish. The objectives should reflect the importance of the goal. If you’re struggling to find clear objectives, perhaps you should rethink the goal. Objectives are the bridges between the concrete-ness of the goal and the qualitativeness of most strategies (think about the strategies you’ve written or seen. Most of them read like, “Increase engagement and positive mentions online among Mom bloggers.”)

One objective for our goal, above, might be, “Reduce our dependence on brick and mortar sales to achieve profitability, and reduce exposure to profit fluctuations because of renegotiated lease rates on store spaces nationwide.”

Now, it’s clear WHY we need to achieve the goal of increasing our online business by 25%.

Next, we look at strategies for achieving the objectives (How are we going to share Why we care about What?). Strategies are, often, less concrete than goals or tactics. It actually makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. Good plans start with the concrete, the measurable. They march through the more nebulous, theory-strewn areas of objectives and strategies, and finish back in the world of the concrete with tactics. There’s a nice symmetry to it.

A strategy might be, “To increase the number of unique visits to our web site.” Yes, I recognize that our hypothetical web site might need some overhauling to convert better, or that we would need additional strategies and possibly objectives to achieve our goal. I’m not trying to write a complete marketing communications plan here, just frame the high points.

Finally, we need tactics that support each strategy (What, specifically, are we going to Do, in what way, and how does it achieve the big What?) One tactic might be: “Use Twitter and Facebook to engage online communities and promote the (presumably great, useful) content on our blog (which resides on our web site…)” Other tactics may not involve social media, or may be a mix of social media and more traditional online and offline marketing. As long as they support the strategy of increasing unique visits to our website, they are appropriate and tactically relevant.

Getting people to the website via checking out our blog fits our strategy and the information there would (presumably) help us reframe ourselves as a top online seller (of whatever it is we’re selling). All this to achieve the overall goal of increasing our online business by 25% so we can minimize overall negative profit impacts by renegotiated leases.

Recently I posted this to Twitter:

Been a #schizomedia kind of day. Social media blog post, in studio for radio spot, finished TV script.

It was a momentary, kind of throwaway comment on a fragmented day, but a couple of people responded to the idea of “schizomedia,” which made me think a little deeper about what it really meant. Many professions, mine included, suffer from the twin myths of technology:

1. “Everybody” owns a computer now, and all I need to do that (Insert your service here) is to buy a program that does it for me. Think graphic design, layout, photography, marketing, accounting, tax preparation, legal advice and even medical advice.
2. OK, so I’m not a marketing whiz, I’ll pay for that service… but since it’s done by computer now-a-days, it should cost less, right?

I really wish I had an “insert brilliance” or “project plan outcome” button resident in my Photoshop or InDesign programs. Even better would be a “market overview” button that would instantly illuminate every pertinent detail in a given marketplace so I could skip all that pesky research.
But (stepping off the soapbox now) the truth is that what I do every day is hard work… mentally if not always physically. I love it; I wouldn’t want to do anything else, and I’m blessed that clients believe in the results and choose to hire me to continue to do it. But it’s still demanding and schizomedia has made it more so. I don’t believe in mediocre work. That means I need to be excellent in every form of marketing or advertising that we offer our clients, or know someone who is.
The number of disciplines, mediums and marketplaces I need to know…. really know… has expanded significantly over the past three years. I think this is true for many service/knowledge professions. I am excited about the future of my profession and enjoying the challenge of becoming excellent in more areas. I don’t think radio, television and newspaper are going away anytime soon, if ever, and they are still a vital part of the media mix for some of our clients. So I think my world will continue to be schizomedic for a while. And I’m OK with that… just don’t tell me you think it should all cost less now that we have computers

It’s Sunday, but my weekend is suffering from a case of project convergence. It’s what happens when all your project planning goes awry (sometimes through no fault of your own) and multiple project deadlines converge. I work well under pressure; in fact, some of my very best work & ideas happen under the threat of imminent deadline. However, I can still only get through X amount of work in Y time. When a serious case of convergence happens, it can be paralyzing… Where to start? I can’t get it all done in time!! The planning for failure starts: who to e-mail or voicemail asking for an extension? Are there any shortcuts out there? And so begins the “research” into working & planning to work instead of actually working. Rather than spend time planning how to come up short & disappoint, I’ve learned that
my only way forward is to quickly prioritze based on what I think I can accomplish and start tackling that list.
Usually, I complete far more work than my panicked, convergence-resisting self thought possible.
Don’t paralyze yourself with a complete project list of all the things you can’t accomplish (in the time you have, anyway). Just start… Creativity has a momentum all its own and you’ll likely amaze yourself.