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The Hidden Treasures Of Social Networking

2010-08-02T15:18:00.001-07:00

Skeptics have tried to trivialize the Social Networking revolution that we are witnessing, largely fed and amplified by the advent of a myriad social networking tools. They say it's a fad. They say that they just don't care to know that their newly rediscovered friend from the class of 1985 is enjoying a ham sandwich at that very moment. They cite recent privacy concerns with Facebook as proof of a new axis of evil forming before our eyes... from Twitter, to Facebook to LinkedIn. Yet, those same critics are also signing up with their own Facebook pages in droves, and secretly search for their long lost highschool sweetheart on Classmates.com. Social Networking has unleashed in us the most powerful of all human needs. The need to connect with other human beings.

Some people maintain that Social Networking has simply brought to the virtual world what we already do successfully in the physical world. Connecting with more people and building meaningful relationships with people we care about. I think that in reality it's quite the opposite. Social Networking tools have given us the ability to build new relationships, and enhance old ones that were until now weighted down by the limitations of the physical world, time and distance.
To support my point, let me just offer a few ways in which our personal and professional lives can truly be enriched by Social Networking, without sacrificing our humanity, personal and family time.

Getting Peer Perspective: On a daily basis we are bombarded by thousands of marketing and advertising messages, while we know that we retain very little of that. When it comes to making purchase decisions we place a lot more value in what our friends and other like-minded individuals tell us based on their first hand experience. I don't know about you, but prior to Twitter and Facebook it was highly unlikely that I would pick up the phone and ask a few hundred of my friends, ONE AT A TIME, whether they bought that flat screen or what restaurant they liked most in the theater district in NYC. Same holds true with my business network. Asking about the pros and cons on a hot new product or service, usually takes an investment in 140 characters on Twitter or less instead of countless hours in phone calls and individual emails!

Networking For Dummies: To some people, networking comes naturally. it's part of their DNA. For the rest of us who have struggled for years to build that anachronism called a rolodex and failed miserably to add more than a dozen ridiculously outdated contacts in it, LinkedIn has come to the rescue in a huge way. Now I am a proud member of the "over-500" club and totally jazzed to realize that I actually remember more than 90% of the people in my LinkedIn network. Even those lost souls in my network whom I struggle to recall, a quick glance at their LinkedIn photo and job history usually triggers a memory and saves the day. Better yet, I get notifications when my contacts change jobs which gives me a great reason to call or email, I see what clubs or groups they belong to which let's me say something semi-intelligent to them in conversation other than "how's business", and I can also find more people I know from past lives just by browsing the list of people connected to my contacts. This is a small world. Inevitably you find people you worked with in some past life, and assuming you did not burn many bridges, you can easily rekindle relationships that would have otherwise stayed dormant for years.

You e-Profile: Whether you like it or not, the web, and social networking tools in particular make it easier for people to find more and more information about us. There's no use getting upset over it. Instead, embrace the new reality and take control (as much as you can) of what is written about you on the web. Social Networking profiles, given the networks' sheer size and influence, show up on top of the search engine results when someone searches out your name. What better way to tell the world exactly what they should know about you. Share the information you want people to know and create as many social networking profiles as you can manage. At the very minimum, join the big 3 (FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter) and get busy creating the profile that you want people to see. One of the lesser known but hugely influential public directories is called Google Profile. As you can imagine, your Google Profile, exactly as you develop it, shows up on the first page of every Google search with your name in the search parameters. Unless you have a few hundred thousand dollars to spare in advertising, this is a free, no-brainer alternative to get on the first page of a Google search, with information that you actually WANT people to see.

Staying In Touch is NOT Hard To Do: I know you hate to admit it, but if you are on Facebook already, you are spending at least a half hour each day checking on your friends to see what they are up to, sharing pictures of the world's cutest kids (yours), and checking out the family photos of a person you work with just because you are curious to find out if that person you've been working with all these years actually has a life outside of the office! It's a well known fact that people do business with people they like. Facebook allows you to show the kind of person you are in "real life" which in turn can not only lead to new friendships but can also lead to better business relationships. Once you've seen pictures of your boss playing with their kids or hanging out with their friends at a party you tend to see them more as a person and less as a "suit" which can lead to fewer walls between you and a closer working relationship.

So as you read the above, don't get me wrong. Social Networking is not the solution to world hunger nor global warming. It does, however, represent a technology enabler which, if used appropriately, can amplify and enrich the lives we live both at home as well as at work.
My advise? Embrace Social Networking. It is here to stay and the benefits far outweigh the shortcomings.

"Drive-By" Marketing Is Gone!

2010-06-14T06:54:00.000-07:00

It used to be that we as marketers looked to fly in and deliver the message to the right audience at exactly the right time, to influence behavior. We now have to maintain a continuous, value-based dialogue that lets us build relationships and trust with a broad audience over time. Not only can we not guess when they'll be ready to listen, we also cannot tell anymore if they are the right audience. The hard lines that differentiated decision influencers from decision makers are gone as layoffs wreaked havoc on traditional job descriptions and scope of responsibility. The idea now is for us to build relationships with a broad set of prospects and already be there when the prospect raises their hand and is ready to engage. The days of "drive-by marketing" are gone!

Does DM Still Work?

2010-06-14T06:38:00.000-07:00

This question was posed on Focus.com where I contribute. I've had a lot of experience with DM in previous lives and I have personally seen the decline of DM over the last few years. However, there's a reason why we call it Marketing "MIX". Different vehicles work for different customers and industries. It's true that DM is less effective today than it was 10 years ago. There are a lot more marketing stimuli to compete with now, and people's attention span (and patience) is drastically shorter. Having said that, a DM piece to the right audience, with thoughtful creative that breaks the clutter can still work. It won't make the sales for you (nothing will), but it can still create the positive mind-state to open the door for you. I'd reserve it for times when the audience is very clear, and you can deliver something of value to them that they can get their hands on (assuming the piece stands out amongst the 5lbs of junk that hits the mailbox every day)

5 signs that your small business needs a marketing makeover

2010-06-02T15:20:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Small businesses are the “engine that could”... get the economy back on track. There’s no question in my mind that good-old american ingenuity and the ever-present drive to succeed will prove to be a winning combination once again.

But as small business owners drive hard to regain momentum and start growing again, they realize that things are not how they used to be. While most businesses are seeing signs of life they are also finding that large companies, starved for new customers, are coming down-market, looking to pick a fight. They are looking to make up for their painful losses by grabbing customers right out of the weakened grasp of their smaller competitors.

As a result, Mr and Mrs Small Business America realize that they need to start looking more “polished” than they did before, in order to protect their existing customers and have a chance of winning new ones. So they take a hard look at their marketing presence, and they don’t like what they see.

Below are 5 telling signs that a marketing makeover is not only called for, but necessary.

SIGN #!: No Marketing Plan

Having a marketing plan is no guarantee of success, but not having a plan is a guarantee of failure. No marketing plan means no brand strategy and no marketing objectives, which means the tactical campaigns you deploy (emails, webinars, brochures, advertising) are not pushing in the same direction. A plan is well within your reach (see “Anatomy of a Marketing Plan”). Start thinking about yours today!

SIGN #2: A Flat Website

In the early stages of the dotcom era, just having a company presence on the web was enough. A website that was in essence an “electronic brochure” was very much the norm. Standing out from the rest carried a price tag that was only approachable by the largest of corporations, with very understanding CFOs. That feels like is so last century nowadays. Web development tools available now, give us the ability to add interactivity, visual flare and rich media at prices that are well within the reach of the smallest of companies. So the only thing between you and an impressive, clutter-breaking website is your imagination (with a little help from a creative web designer).

SIGN #3: No Human Face

People like doing business with other people. Not call center menus, automated attendants or inquiry email boxes. You have to show your face. Especially small businesses where the “leadership team” is the only team and the DNA of the company is almost identical to the DNA of the owner or the partners. Share more about who you are, your blogs, your Linked-In profile, your tweets, your profile photo. The fewer layers and distractions between you and the customer the better. If anything, one of the tools you have against the big companies is that you are right there...involved, engaged and fully attentive to their needs. No corporation can match that. So why are you hiding it?

SIGN #4: No Brand Personality

Brands are like people. They have personalities (well, most of them do). In today’s marketplace, you can’t be a non-entity. You can’t go under the radar and expect to be noticed. Your brand must stand for something. It must be clear and distinct, and it must have stopping power. All it takes is some thought and a plan of action that keeps all your marketing and sales touch-points singing the same tune. If your brand personality is supposed to be smart and aggressive, but your website projects a soft and inviting persona, and your sales presentation looks like neither of those two approaches, then you’ll have a split brand personality and a bunch of confused (and uninterested) prospective customers.

SIGN #5: One-Dimensional Lead Generation

If any marketing consultant tells you that they have a marketing campaign that’s sure to yield the leads you need, save yourself some time and money and say your goodbyes right there. Marketing is both art and science, and increasingly these days, it looks like the art part is taking over. Comparisons with past direct mail response rates, sales close rates, click through rates and every other marketing metric you can think of should be put away as business history. Tactics that use to work well in the past may fail miserably today, and vice versa. Cost-effective web-based techniques allow you to experiment with new marketing tactics and hedge your bets with little risk. And don’t hesitate to switch your marketing mix on a dime. You may have to get used to that going forward.

So, take a hard look at your small business and ask your self: would you be doing business with you?

It’s never too late for a marketing makeover to get you ready for the “new normal!

Best of luck out there..

From My Diary Of Bad Business Practices (Or Good Practices Implemented Badly)

2010-04-16T18:57:00.000-07:00

Before I launched emorfie, a marketing consulting firm, I spent most of my career in marketing and strategic planning roles in global F500 enterprises. I enjoyed all of those years thoroughly and have had the privilege of working with top notch professionals in a variety of functions.

Though I have experienced the benefits of working in large, world-class organizations and given the opportunity to work on many successful high-impact initiatives, I don't want to bore you by describing the successes. Instead, I'll give you a quick view of the most memorable examples of bad business practices that I've seen (or had contributed to in some way). I really believe that you can learn a lot more from failure than you do from success.

I'll leave off details like company names and people to protect the innocent!

Bad Business Practice #1: The Ever-Growing Virtual Team
For whatever reason, over the years I found myself "volunteered" to lead special Task Forces, SWAT teams, Special Project teams and all kinds of other serious-sounding teams of cross-functional representatives, brought together to accomplish a strategic deliverable.

In the beginning of my career, I did what any good corporate citizen would do. I'd reach out to all organizations who were likely to have a vested interest in the project, and I'd ask for their best and brightest to participate on my virtual team. 25 participants later, and an additional 2-3 new participants or tag-alongs being added every week, the foundation of dysfunction was solidly in place. Too many unnecessary discussions and disagreements about minutia, too many people who felt the need to express an opinion (even if they didn't have one), too many points of potential interference from too many peripheral players.

Do yourself a favor, no matter how many potential stakeholders there may be in the company, prioritize all stakeholders, pick the 5-6 most influential ones and cap it as tight as you can right there. As long as you have the primary stakeholders on board everyone else will fall in line with the recommendations at the end of the process.

Bad Business Practice #2: Meetings of The Multi-Taskers
In corporate environments, where meetings tend to be a viewed as a necessary evil, you probably find yourself (a did I) in meetings or conference calls at least 50%-70% of your day depending on your function. Being part of that environment for many years, I didn't question it for a while. it's was part of the experience and part of the way we work, so I didn't want to disrupt the operating model (nor did I think that I could). Given that other work activities and expectations never took a break, I found myself oftentimes trying to catch up on email while trying to stay in tune with the main essence of what was being discussed. And ofcourse most of the time, everyone was doing the same thing, except the person doing the talking. I remember looking around the room sometimes and I wouldn't even be able to see a face.....only the backs of laptop screens.....and on the phone I'd constantly hear the IM "bing" which everyone eventually tuned out as background noise. I even saw (and sadly participated once), in IM chatter with people in the same boring meeting!

After a while I drew the line and only attend meetings where I knew for a fact the value derived from the meeting was actually higher than the value derived from catching up with aging emails. After I applied that simple logic prior to accepting a meeting invitation, I ended up shaving at least 50% of my meetings out of my workday. I got back some valuable desk-time, I focused 100% on what was being discussed at the fewer meetings I did attend (I even stopped taking my laptop along , although I was guilty of sneaking a peak at me iPhone if I was waiting on an important email), and amazingly I got very little push-back for declining meetings!

Bad Business Practice #3: The "Reply All" Disease
Ever since we discovered email, which undoubtedly had a profound positive effect in productivity, compared to the typed "memoranda" people used to send around, we also figured out a way to clutter everyone's email by unnecessarily replying to all recipients, causing a snowball of mostly unwanted email chatter.

What started as innocent misuse of a great business application, morphed into an instrument for practitioners of CYA and people who decided to use email to show everyone in the organization how busy they are by the volume of emails they generate. And of course you have the simple, misguided souls that reply to all and say "great job Dave", and "I agree with everything that was said below". Just do yourself a favor and reply only to the person asking a question or looking for feedback, and reserve the reply-all for those moments in your career when you discover a million-dollar product enhancement, or the next Enron-like coverup. Everyone, including your mailbox administrator, will thank you for it.

Bad Business Practice #4: Death By Powerpoint
I fell in love with powerpoint early in my career. I could take a complex concept or proposal, develop a few good looking charts and flow diagrams, sprinkle a few key words in there and let the deck be a visual companion of the words I used to tell the story. The love affair lasted for most of my career, but over the years I noticed that the powerpoint decks (including mine) were getting longer and more cluttered with irrelevant information, and the key messages within them became harder to find, obscured by clouds of nothingness and phrases that seemed to get recycled from presentation to presentation over the years.

People started using powerpoint as a replacement of the human voice. Some people feel that putting the powerpoint slides up on the wall, or on the go-to-Meeting screen, relieves them of the responsibility to make a single intelligent point. So, they robotically read point after point, paragraph after long paragraph and then wonder why people start thumbing around for their iPhones and Blackberries.

So, if you have any control over the meeting, do everyone a favor and enforce the "5" rule: Limit all slide presentations to 5 slides, 5 bullets per slide and 5 words per bullet. You'd be amazed how quickly the essence of the presentation gets pushed out in the open for a healthy dialogue, and how many "empty suits" you'll uncover who really feel naked without 75 slides of irrelevant factoids and unreadable, badly formatted worksheets to hide their lack of knowledge.

Bad Business Practice #5: Offsites That Run Beyond 2 Days
After almost two decades in F500 companies I can't even begin to estimate how many man-hours I've spent in cold, window-less hotel conference rooms or over-priced golf resorts pontificating away with groups of other pontificators from around the world (who flew first class and spent an average of $5K in total t&e to waste time collectively). Add to that the cost of the outside "facilitators", evening fire-breather or magician for entertainment, embroidered golf shirts and unnecessary overnight "WorkBook" packages to the hotel and you get the idea.

Not that all time spent on such large planning exercises was a waste of time. Just about 50% of it was. And why is that?

What happens is that the VP organizing the love-fest feels the need to ask all the direct reports on his team to present for an hour each, about the brillant things their group did last quarter and the brilliant things they'll do next quarter, then you add the guest speakers from other functions that are deemed "vital to the success of the group", then you invite the head huncho (or two) to bless the team, a few local sales people to tell us how things are in the real world, and a couple of customers to tell us how great our salespeople and product are. And of course, you add the customary full-day "working session" where you ask people from different functions who are relatively clueless about each-other's business to come up with each others' critical priorities for the upcoming year. And for good measure you also add a whole day of team-building activities, complete with having to let yourself fall backwards in your teammates arms and making a fool of yourself in egg-tossing....and you have yourself a 4-day boondoggle like most of them.
I found the following to work a lot better: 2 day maximum on planning meetings, taking place in a conference room in your own facility vs a hotel (the overhead projectors actually work and you control the room temperature). You start early (7:30a), to maximize the time you have the team together, you give only 15 min breaks and a working lunch. You work late the first day and grab a team dinner for socializing and building relationships. Then, start again on the second day at 7:30a, go through about 3p and then do something social for the rest of the day - totally casual and fun.

After that, the out-of-towners take flights early the next morning and the rest of the team is back at the salt mines the next morning. Limit guest presenters and give no-one more than 30 minutes to present their stuff (and 5 slides to do it with). Facilitate the meeting yourself and involve the team in realistic, short exercises that take advantage of their specific areas of expertise.
No planning meeting is perfect, but you can make them a heck of a lot more productive than they usually are!

Conclusion
In closing, don't let this give you a false impression of a miserable life in large enterprises. Large companies are a wonderful place to build a career, they offer a proving ground of new ideas and experiences and they expose you to a wide array of professionals. They also expose you to many bad practices that you can learn from, and try not to emulate in your own career and/or business.

I am sure you have your own examples as well. Give us your top "Bad Business Practice" so we can collectively learn and avoid the land-mines together.

Anatomy of a Marketing Plan

2010-02-20T13:42:00.000-08:00

Many companies, with little or no in-house marketing expertise, often make a crucial mistake. They a jump from the "glimmer in the eye" stage to tactical marketing execution, completely bypassing a small detail: a Marketing Plan.

Such companies belong to the "shoot-then-aim" school of marketing. Their entrepreneurial senses tell them that it's better to act fast and make decisions based on well-honed instincts rather than "waste time" with a marketing plan. Some also misunderstand the truism that "marketing is more art than science", to mean that there is no science in marketing. I would submit that practicing the "art of marketing" without a fact-based marketing plan is a going-out-of-business strategy.

A good marketing plan is not a 100-slide powerpoint deck that jams your email box, nor a beautifully bound narrative that collects dust on your shelf until it gets introduced to the shredder at the end of the year. A good marketing plan is simply a short, concise declaration of what you want to achieve and what activities are best suited to help get you there. This plan merely acts as the "decoder ring" to help guide your marketing investments throughout the year and stay focused on achieving your stated goals.

Following is a general guide that I personally use to put together actionable marketing plans. The structure remains consistent regardless of the size and complexity of your business.

I always separate the plan in 4 very basic sections: "Surround", "What", "How", and "Dashboard"

I. The SURROUND section:

This section is all about sensing and completely understanding a 360 degree view of your business surroundings. It includes:

Market Trends: Identify the “macro-trends” that may have an impact in your space over the 2-5 year horizon. Also include market size projections viewed against key variables like customer size, geographic region and vertical industry where possible. Finally, include a thorough assessment of your top 3 competitors and a view of their market share positions and shifts over time.

Customer Analysis: Take whatever raw data you have around your customer’s behavior and analyze it by looking at every conceivable angle. Some customers have point-of-sale data, service event history, sales data, web site analytics or some combination thereof. In most companies though, the data sits idle in a database (or worst, yet in spreadsheets on someone’s PC). There is a wealth of knowledge you can extract by simply running a few queries and pivot tables on your customer data. Try it. You will be amazed to see elements of your customer’s DNA pop up to the surface.

Segmentation: A combination of your past experience and some analytics will start to shed light on the segments of customers you serve. Those segments may be characterized by revenue level, vertical industry, firm size or many other variables. Define 3-4 “tribes” based on the common threads you see among your customers, and start to think of your customers in terms of the “tribe” they belong to. Once you understand each tribe's behavior, wants and needs you will be able to develop lazer focused value propositions, marketing messages and sales tools.

II. The WHAT section:

This section is basically a crystal clear articulation of what you are trying to achieve with your marketing investment in the coming year. It needs to be crisp, to the point and void of “marketing speak”. In other words, this is NOT language you’d see in advertising campaigns or on the website. It’s the essence of what you are trying to achieve:

Vision/Mission: 1-2 sentence description of what the marketing organization is set out to achieve for the company over the long term.

Example: “To position the firm as a hip, innovative, and agile provider of business mobility solutions that cross both personal and professional boundaries, and help reach #1 market share position in three years”.

The key here of course, is to ensure that the mission lines up perfectly with the overall business plan for the company.

Marketing Objectives: Specific and measurable, these are the key marketing objectives that if achieved, will allow us to complete our mission.

Example: “Re-craft the company's brand positioning strategy to transition towards a young/hip brand personality, using rich-media web banners and social networking tools to raise awareness and break through the clutter”

Try to stay focused and avoid “mission-creep” by staying with a maximum of 4-6 key objectives (which may include sub-objectives if necessary)

III. The HOW section:

Now that we know WHAT we are trying to achieve, we are ready to get more specific and determine the HOW:

Initiatives/Tactics: For each objective you will have a number of tactical initiatives/tasks that describe the actual work to be done to support the objective. Again, to avoid losing sight of too many actions, it's best to group tactics together and stay within around 5 tactics per objective if possible (varied depending on the size of organization and the scope of the objective)

Example: “launch a new $50K brand-building campaign using Google SEM and web banners in IT/CIO-focused web properties, to coincide with the launch of mobile 2.0 product in June”.

Each tactic should include specific targets that will determine success (eg 1,000 registrants on website, 200 leads, 2x improvement in lead-to-close ratio etc etc). The plan should also identify initiative champions (down to the individual, not just group), expected time of completion, key milestones and budget.

IV. The DASHBOARD section:

No marketing plan is complete without a clear understanding of key metrics that define success for the year, and a mechanism to track progress on a regular basis. One of the common mistakes made is to distribute a marketing plan, get everyone to agree on the initiatives it prescribes and then enter a dark tunnel for the year, only re-opening the plan at the end of the year to see if the objectives were achieved.

Keeping constant (at least monthly if not weekly) watch of marketing goal attainment vs objectives via a dashboard, will allow you to raise yellow flags and make necessary adjustments in a timely fashion. Waiting for the end of the year to determine if goals were achieved is obviously too late to affect the results for the year. Think about it this way: a ship that sets sail from New York to England and veers off course by just one degree a day, will probably end up on the West coast of Africa by the end of the journey!

Some of the marketing metrics that are usually tracked via a marketing dashboard include, but are not limited to:

Marketing-influenced revenue
# of leads generated
Lead-to-close conversion
Cost per Lead
Brand awareness %
Brand consideration %
Web metrics (unique visitors, visit duration, pages per visit etc)
# of new case studies/success stories published
# of press mentions, positive vs negative press, web buzz generated
# of impressions, solicits, responders, registrants as part of demand gen campaigns

In closing, always keep in mind that if you don’t have a map of where you are going, any road will take you there! A good marketing plan is within reach of any size company. All it takes is careful review of the intelligence available to you, clear thinking and emphasis on focus.

Good luck. May the marketing gods be with you!

Power to the Twitter-er? Are We Seeing a Customer Voice Power Shift?

2010-02-15T08:57:00.000-08:00

A great blog by Carol Wolicki entitled "Does Web 2.0 Change Companies’ Ability to…Huh? They Said What?" really got me thinking about the customer voice power shift taking place in front of our eyes.

It used to be that very large, profitable customers were the only ones with a direct line of sight to the CEO...and their customer support escalations always climbed the top of the priority list for a CEO of Head of Sales. At the same time, an average very ticked off customer, no matter the level of frustration or misconduct by the company, had no chance of ever reaching the CEO's office (or anyone in the executive suite for that matter) without rounds of verbal jousting with customer service, a few flame emails and possibly a lawsuit threat.

This dynamic changes a bit nowadays, when the frustrated customer tweets their gripe to a few thousand of their friends who re-tweet to a few thousand of theirs. All of the sudden, the PR issue this creates can cost a heck of a lot more to the company's time and resources than the single voice in the wilderness by an irate customer before the advent of social networking.

Do you think we are we seeing the "voice of the customer" power, shift to twittter-er?

Three Steps To New Generation Marketing Practices for Emerging Businesses

2010-02-04T21:41:00.000-08:00

It is clear to me, as I think it is for most people, that small business ingenuity, agility and good-old fashioned hard work is what built this economy, and what will help it come back to life again. What small and emerging businesses have now that they didn’t have before, is the ability to use web-enabled marketing techniques and tools to better compete against their larger, deep-pocketed rivals - for a fraction of the price and manpower.

Whether using webinars to generate leads, viral YouTube videos to increase brand awareness, or Twitter and Facebook to proactively manage customer service escalations, small companies ‘acting big’ are now harder to distinguish from larger, more established firms. As larger firms head ‘down-market’ in search of ever-elusive new customers, smaller companies are using ‘marketing 2.0’ techniques to fend them off and grow. A small company can now launch a 50,000-contact email campaign for $250/month, run search engine ads on the world’s biggest search engine for less than $10/day, and launch a press release to hundreds of thousands of media outlets all over the world for free.

Having access to new and exciting marketing tools is one thing; knowing how to use them effectively in alignment with a plan, is yet another. Emerging companies can’t afford to spend hours on the web trying to keep up with the latest and greatest marketing practices, nor can they afford to spend their limited human resources to orchestrate the activities of multiple creative agencies. As a result, many emerging companies default to the “shoot-then-aim” school of marketing. The boundless creative energy and tendency to act at lightning speed that characterizes the typical entrepreneur can come back to bite them, when it comes to marketing execution! The most brilliant, award-winning marketing campaign that happens to be off-strategy is as good as throwing money down the drain.

Analysis-Paralysis, which is anathema for most emerging companies, is not the answer. But there’s a middle ground between lightning-fast execution and slow/deep scientific analysis. There are three important steps that I would recommend, to all companies before moving to execution of marketing campaigns.

STEP I: Perform MarketScape Analysis and Build “Top 3” Competitive Profiles

If you did your own informal poll among small and medium sized firms, you’ll most likely find that a very small number of management team members or business owners can put a dollar figure on the addressable market that they target, or know the market share of their top three competitors (or their own market share for that matter). Why? Usually because there’s a perception that acquiring and internalizing market and competitive intelligence, is costly, time consuming and reserved for larger companies.

Needless to say, that is not the case. We are fortunate enough to live in an age where information is practically surrounding us. Understanding both the market you operate in, as well as the competitors that you are battling against is not only easily achievable nowadays but a key and core ingredient of success. Following are some of the key elements that I would recommend in this step:

Trends: Look for existing analyst papers/studies or other third-party research identifying the top industry defining trends over the next 2-3 years. Extract only the most vital elements that may impact (directly and peripherally) your business. This is the cornerstone of all planning actions to follow.
Scenario Planning: Pick the 3-5 most important industry trends described above and do a “war-gaming” workshop with some of your key people, to identify what your company would do if each of the forecasted industry terms actually materialized. Also try to envision what your key competitors may do and how you would react to their actions. Assign probablitiies to these scenarios and prepare the business for taking those actions if necessary in the future.
Competitive Landscape: Pour over existing analyst reports summarizing market share trends, competitor SWOT analyses, competitive news and actions, and everything else you can get your hands on. If no usable information is available, commission a quick internal study or outside consulting engagement to get the basic intelligence you need (it should take no more than 10-20 man-hours to establish a relatively solid foundation of knowledge here, given the wealth of data available and how easy it is to access.)
Competitor Profiles: Rule #1 in war is know your enemy better than they know themselves. Build thorough SWOT analyses (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) on each of your top 3 competitors and contrast them against your own SWOT. Look for areas where your strengths match their weaknesses best and put together single-page sales tools for each competitor, with specific “scripts” on how to attack them (or how to defend when they are attacking.)

STEP II: Customer and Prospect Analytics - Tapping the Gold Mine

Most small companies hear the word “analytics” and they head for the exit. The word invokes visions of overpaid consultants taking 3 months to come back with PhD-level material on intricate econometric theory and colorful custom-code dashboards that has little utility for a small business. Reality is that most customers are only within a few hours of gaining undiscovered intelligence about their customers and prospects that can make the difference between break-even vs profitability, and surviving vs winning big.

Whether it’s retail POS (point of sale) data, a massive excel database with customer contact records, or web traffic data via Google Analytics or StatCounter, data is our friend. Data, however, will never transform into actionable intelligence unless we mine it appropriately. Here’s just a sampling of areas that you can start with:

Customer/Prospect Database: Almost every single customer has one. Whether it’s stored as a Lotus123 spreadsheet from 1986 or a hosted, full-fledged CRM system like SalesForce.com, inquisitive minds running simple queries on the data and asking “what if” questions can surely yield quite a few pearls of wisdom from whatever is available. Do an aging report on your customer contracts, look for changes in churn rate, understand the upgrade path of your most loyal clients, etc. Add to your existing customer database any third party prospect lists and profiles that you’ve acquired (from vendors like D&B, Jigsaw or Hoovers), and you now have an opportunity to contrast and compare customers vs non-customers to sharpen your go-to-market approach.
“Look Alike” Modeling: The premise is simple. Figure out the type of customer you are looking for, figure out what characteristics make those customers unique, and apply those characteristics to the rest of your database to help you find more customers that “look like” them. There are plenty of smart companies, employing very smart mathematicians and statisticians who have made this type of modeling (and many others) repeatable and accessible to companies of all sizes. One such company that we used extensively in a previous company is Sigma Marketing Group out of Rochester NY.
Web Traffic Analytics: The detail and richness of web traffic information available was not even imaginable for the small and medium size companies two years ago. Only large companies could afford dedicated staff that used to shove raw web traffic data in complex visualization software packages, to end up showing you a couple of pretty bar charts of last month’s page loads. With Google Analytics, StatCounter and other web-based applications like them, any business can have free real-time access to every bit of web traffic data imaginable, presented using highly customizable visual aids that practically make the information rise up and slap you across the face.

STEP III: Constructing the Marketing Plan

A wise man once said, “if you don’t know where you are going, any road will lead you there!” Operating without a marketing plan will take you to the same place: nowhere. A lot of smaller companies have a tendency to skip planning in the interest of quick execution, so they fast-forward straight to picking a marketing tactic of the month and doing a “spray and prey” routine: trying different tactics through the year to see what (if anything) will stick. Clearly, not the best approach. The reasons for why they do that are easy to understand. Small businesses think that marketing planning is a lengthy exercise using expensive consultants who deliver a beautifully bound 130-page word document, which collects dust on the shelf until the next planning cycle.

Having built a few marketing plans in my 19 years in marketing and planning roles, I can tell you it doesn’t have to take months nor does it take a genius to develop one (and it definitely does not need to be 130 pages long! A marketing plan is simply clear, rational thinking at work. It’s a declaration of what the company stands for, how it wants to be positioned in the marketplace, and what tactics it will need to execute so it can grow. Following are what I see as the key elements necessary for a solid marketing plan.

Strategic Intent: This is one of the most important elements of the plan. It describes in crisp and unambiguous language what you are aiming to achieve with your marketing efforts. How are you positioning the company? What does the brand stand for? What is your value prop and points of differentiation? Are you optimizing you efforts for revenue growth, profitability or market share (and the answer can’t be all of the above!)
Objectives, Tactics and Metrics: Think of this as a very simple pyramid structure. At the top of the pyramid is your singular strategic intent. It spells out what you want to achieve at the highest level. The next level, midway down the pyramid is a set of 4-6 objectives that break down what you are trying to achieve, into more digestible chunks. The bottom of the pyramid shows the “how” - a number of tactics per objective, that need to be executed successfully to support the plan. Finally, metrics are simply specific and measurable targets that you must set and track against performance throughout the year to ensure that you stay focused on the destination, and make course corrections when necessary.

Conclusion

So to recap, the three steps you have to take before you pull the trigger on your next award-winning viral brand campaign or webinar series are:

Understand your market and competitors,
Understand your own customer set and prospects and..
Take the time to put an aggressive yet achievable marketing plan of what you need to do to win

With that solid foundation in place you will be able to sort through and decide quickly and effectively where to place your marketing investments and how to optimize them.

Many companies have internal marketing teams equipped manage these activities and with bandwidth to dedicate to them. For other companies whose marketing departments and/or resources are less sophisticated, there are many good consulting firms specializing in supporting the small/medium business segment that can surely help.

To see how emorfie can help, just contact me directly (nick@emorfie.com) or visit www.emorfie.com

Nick Panayi

Founder and CEO, emorfie

Top 10 advantages of going from corporate life to entrepreneurship

2010-02-02T20:37:00.000-08:00

After almost two decades in large, global corporations I am beginning to discover some of the advantages of going from corporate to a startup. Here are my top 10:

#10. Getting to control my own thermostat

#9. Making the "reply all" mistake when trying to reply to a single individual means you make 4 new enemies, not 404.

#8. My refrigerator does not play host to chinese food from last summer

#7. I can finally experiment with two colors on my business cards

#6. No longer having to categorize my unread emails using accounts receivable terminology (under 30 days old, 60-90 days old, 90-120 days old, and write-offs)

#5. Actually get to use that resort swimming pool while the corporate guys are cooped up in a window-less banquet hall for 3-days of team building and budget planning workshops

#4. I don't have to give budget back to Finance every quarter (though admittedly there's a slight disadvantage to not having much budget to begin with)

#3. I get to fly coach and gripe with my fellow mortals about leg room and the shrinking size of that bag of pretzels

#2. I can take casual Fridays to a whole new level

And my #1 advantage, going from the HQ office to the home office....

I can use a Mac for work!

Could social media experience a spam like phenomenon similar to email?

2010-01-28T18:26:00.000-08:00

Could social media experience a spam like phenomenon similar to email?

This question was posted on Focus.com today, and it really hit a nerve with me. I have recently made a real effort to spend more time on the blogs and discussion areas and get more active in all my previously "dormant" accounts (in Twitter, Facebook, Naymz etc). So, in the process of doing that I've experience first hand the notion that social networking may be at risk of becoming tomorrow's spam heaven. After some thought though, I cam to the conclusion (for now anyway), that Social Networking is a strong enough trend that it can withstand many challenges, including users's disdain for ever increasing numbers of bots and nasty spam-like invaders.

I think Social Networking sites and applications are definitely starting to show signs of spam-like behavior, but at the same time I think social networking hit a real nerve in the marketplace, and brought into the fold a whole new group of users (the 50+ crowd). I think people will find ways to cope or avoid the negative elements for now. Given the popularity of social networking there will be a bunch of smart people introducing new tools and applications to combat abuse - - (much like virus scans, email filters and pop-up blockers did for us in email and browsing). Social Networking is too big of a wave to be stopped.

Investing in Social Media

2010-01-26T20:09:00.000-08:00

On a great professional collaboration site I visit frequently (Focus.com), an interesting question was posed: how much money are people/marketers willing to invest in social media? Would people invest in building their own social media platforms?

I personally would not invest money in building another social networking site. There's way too many of them to begin with, and new ones are sprouting every day. The power of social media is the strength in numbers that communities of like-minded people can provide. The more sites get crated, the thinner the audience size. At this point I would simply invest in training as many people as possible in the company to be active participants and I would invest in a couple of dedicated soc media jockeys to live online and cover as many sites as possible...

Selling to Small and Medium Businesses

2010-01-24T17:56:00.001-08:00

What I've learned by working with small businesses over the years is that contrary to most marketers' beliefs, small businesses are looking for value...not a cheap price. They are just as interested in quality products and services as large businesses are. Sometimes, even more so, because usually the decision maker's own wallet feels the direct effect of their purchases and therefore they have a heightened sensitivity to ensure they are getting a good deal. A good deal does NOT mean a cheap price. Small businesses are simply looking for a more positive relationship between price and benefit. So how do you give them what they need since the economics of volume purchases don't come into play here, as they do for larger companies? Simply remove the fluff....the surrounding services and side-benefits that usually get packaged in with any product or service, and package only the central features and benefits that small businesses absolutely need. You will end up with customers who feel that they got a great price, as they were able to only buy the features and benefits that they absolutely need and use. Their sense of value from the purchase and the resulting loyalty is high, and you as a marketer walk away with a happy customer and profit margins that are at least as good (if not better) than the large business equivalent of the product.

living in interesting times...

2010-01-12T08:45:00.001-08:00

We live in interesting times! The past few years have seen the dramatic onset of the toughest business environment in a generation. Thousands of companies have folded under the pressure of a 'perfect storm': suddenly dried-up credit markets, collapsing asset values, and customers simply too frightened to spend, all in the face of dramatically increased global competition. Some survived due to sheer size, and others by going into hibernation and hanging on to the customers they had. We are now seeing early signs of economic recovery. All survivors, big and small, now face yet another challenge: Finding ways to grow and prosper in an uncharted business environment...where the rules are yet unwritten, and there is no established recipe for success.

Times such as these are defining moments for individuals and firms who are ready to forge ahead with energy, thirst and wisdom, benefiting from the many lessons learned over the last couple of years. These are the times that separate good companies from great, passive competitors from those who are thoughtfully aggressive, and winners from losers.

I would love for you to email me stories about small or emerging companies that are truly coming out of the recession stronger than ever and swinging hard. This could be your company or just a company you admire. Reading about the strategies and tactics these companies use (especially how they market themselves) will let us all learn and can potentially reveal some of the "secret sauce" necessary to thrive in today's tough environment.

the winning profile...

2010-01-12T08:44:00.003-08:00

As I think about small and medium sized companies that I've encountered over the years, both as a business person and as a consumer, I've found three key attributes that I think start to characterize the DNA of a winner....

Management Style -Young-minded, thoughtfully aggressive and eager to learn new things. They are likely to be appreciative of technology and open to new advances, eager to get a competitive advantage and willing to spend money to carefully think through the alternatives and set a plan of action.

Customer Service - To companies that don't share this "winner DNA", the words "Customer Service" describe a specific department on their org chart. To the winners, these same words describe their core values and the cornerstone of their business. They understand that great customer service yields transformative power and true differentiation that knows no size boundaries. From the way you greet a customer, to how you react when a problem arises, customer service is where all businesses earn their stripes. Some companies go through their entire life-cycle never realizing this simple fact, but winning companies never forget it!

Humanity in Business - Some people live their whole professional life completely and totally separated from their "normal" life. They have a work personality and a home personality. To some degree, that's a safe strategy and sometimes a necessity in certain business environments. But at some point we all come to a realization that we are just human beings making a living and working to support our families. And the people and companies that treat us like humans get our attention... and many times earn our loyalty and business. Whether it's the retailer that hires a disabled person, or the company that includes families in company events or provides daycare for working mothers.....these are the companies that we remember...and that's the business behavior that can cast a positive halo around everything the company does...