Grow your business – simple yet effective
How do you grow your business? Have you ever looked at business that have grown and wonder how they do it? Chances are they use a combination of these simple common sense ideas.
- If you have an established client base, most of your marketing money should be spent on re-selling to your existing customers
- It is a lot easier to sell something else to your existing customers than to get a new customer.
- Only sell to people who want what you have and value what you do. Other people will take all your time but not contribute significantly to your bottom line.
- The more information you give in your ads, the more you’ll sell.
- If your ads look like editorial articles you'll get a lot more readership than ads that look like ads.
- Never ever run any advertisement or any promotion without monitoring the response.
- Don’t try to be creative or original. Stick to what works even if it seems boring to you.
- Use benefit headlines in all your ads.
- Client testimonials increase credibility – and sales. Use written, audio and video testimonials.
Managing Multiple Locations
In the past, a team almost always resided in one location, and where the company was spread of multiple locations, each location tended to operate as an autonomous unit reporting into a head office. The reason is obvious: it wasn't easy to communicate and collaborate with people who were not in the same physical location. The communication has improved, and so can the management.
Now it's quite common to have team members that collaborate and work together every day that are physically located in many different places. In some cases, you may have team members that are working from home or from satellite offices. This is becoming a popular model as people are striving for work/life balance and moving away from a long commute to a central office.
All of this is more common today because of advances in technology and software. People can access your company's computer network remotely with almost the same speed as if they were in the office. Software is available to share documents and make updates available real-time to the rest of the team. The team can get together as needed using phone conferencing. You can even see each other if you like using teleconferencing or utilising video technology over the web. Free software like Skype (www.skype.com) has made the world a much smaller place.
That's all good news. The not-so-good news is that it is still easier to manage a team when the members are located together. There's no technology that can take the place of talking to them face-to-face. This is a challenge I have everyday, with both my team and customers being spread across Sydney and Newcastle offices.
These ideas can help you better manage a dispersed project team.
1. Attitude. Both manager and team members must be especially diligent and sensitive to collaboration and teamwork concerns when part of the team is remote. It's easy for a remote worker to feel isolated from what's going on with the rest of the team. People who're working remotely must be proactive communicators and must be especially good at working independently and meeting their deadlines.
2. Communication. The project manager needs to be proactive in communicating to ensure the team works well together. There should be regularly scheduled meetings where the remote workers attend in person (weekly, monthly or quarter depending on the distance). If this is difficult, try doing it by Video Conferencing or Conference Calls.
3. Technology. Make sure that your remote team members have the right hardware, software, and other equipment to get their work done. This will include, Intranet's, High Speed Connectivity, Mobile Connectivity, VPNs etc.
There is inherent risk associated with remote team members. This is increased due to physical difference away and time differences. It's hard to grow the same culture in satellite locations, especially if the team member is working alone. You have to work hard to make sure they feel part of the team and are not kept in the dark compared with people working out of the main office.
Email – Saviour or Bane of your existence?
Digital messaging seems to be the preferred method of conversation these days, with emails being the preferred method for business communication and SMS being the preferred method of communication between friends.
The advantages are clear
- it takes a lot less time to shoot off a message than make a phone call
- there is a written record of the communication, which is handy for business
- you can copy other people in on the conversation, so it is easier to keep people in the loop
- you can think about your response before replying
- you respond to emails at a time that suits you
- with wireless devices such as Blackberry’s and PDA’s you can access your email anywhere in the world at anytime.
But there are also a lot of disadvantages that must be considered
- there is a lot of communication in tone and body language that cannot be conveyed in an email.
- many emails are written quickly and sent of without being proof read by the author, let alone another person. This can lead to spelling and grammar mistakes and miscommunication.
- if you read, review and reply to every email as it comes in, you can spend your entire day on emails in an adhoc manner. This can kill any productivity that you had and make you feel a slave to your email.
- you can easily use a wrong word, or send your email to the wrong person, which can lead to accidentally sharing confidentially information, embarrassment or even legal action.
If you want to see some particular bad email mistakes have a look at www.thinkbeforeyousend.com.
OK, so email is here to stay and with the proliferation of wireless devices that can send / receive emails, I believe it will also replace SMS as a form of instant communication in the near future. So what can we do to make sure that it has a positive impact on our professional and personal life.
- You need to be self disciplined to not respond to each email as it comes into your inbox. This builds an expectation that you will reply to everything instantly, and people perceive a drop in service when you have a day off or are in training for a day. You should review and reply to all your emails in a batch once a day and only reply to emails that need urgent attention more frequently. Turn of your email notification in outlook so you aren’t distracted every time and email comes in. You can do the same on your Blackberry and turn off the email download function during periods when you not working or working on a project that needs focus and concentration.
- Try and cut down the number of emails that you receive. Have emails that you are being cc’d into, go into a different folder, these are for information only and don’t require a response. Get yourself off mailing lists and opt to instead subscribe to the RSS feeds of these services.
- Always proof read every email, no matter how short it is. Check for spelling and grammar, but also read it aloud to see how it sounds. Is there anyway that it could be misinterpreted. Get a colleague to check it to if in doubt.
- Never send an email that you wouldn’t want the whole world to read.
- Never send private content including credit card numbers in emails.
- Write the email content first and add the subject and recipients in second. This will ensure that you proof read the email and don’t accidentally send it.
- If you aren’t fully confident that your email will be interpreted with the intent you had in mind then ring the person to get your message across and then confirm the result of you conversation in a document.
- The combination of face-to-face, phone and email communication at the right times and in the right proportions will give you an edge over your competitors.
Would you walk 100km for your dream?
In many ways getting an online business off the ground and to the point where it is creating a significant sustainable income is like doing a 100km walk. I came to this conclusion when competing in the Oxfam Trailwalker in Sydney last week. You have a lot of time to think when you walk 100km.
The Oxfam Trailwalker is an event where a team of four walks together to complete 100km over a 48 hour period. There are 8 checkpoints along the way and each team must enter and leave the checkpoint as a team of 4. At each checkpoint you are met by a support crew who can give you food, refill camel packs, change clothes and attend to injuries.
I was invited to join with a team of 3 other friends and colleagues and thought it sounded like a good challenge at the time. The reality of continuously walking 100km is quite different!
In the lead up to the event we met every couple of weeks to plan the event, what we would need to bring, who we would need to support us, what training we needed to do and how long we thought it would take us.
Three weeks before the event, we walked the second half of the course, and I'm glad we did. There was 2100m of incline and 2300m of decline, and it was a real wake up call to what we were going to be up for on the day.
Our team left Middle Head in Sydney at 7am on Friday 25th August and start walking towards the first of 9 checkpoints with a goal of 27 hours. It had been raining consistently for the last week in Sydney so the tracks were pretty muddy and at times required us to take off shoes to cross creeks. You couldn't get from one checkpoint to the next without getting your shoes wet, so we had to change socks at every checkpoint.
The toughest part of the course was coming into check point 7 (72km down, 28km to go) at 3.30am. We had walked 4 hours for the 13.5kms from checkpoint 6 in the dark with headlights on. There was a lot of mist, which made visibility very poor and the track was very rough. We had been walking for over 20 hours and fatigue was setting is, so there was a lot of slipping and tripping and we knew the hardest parts of the course were still to come. It was a mind game at this stage to keep going. Almost 600 of the 2000 competitors pulled out of trailwalker throughout the event and over 200 pulled out at checkpoint 7.
After an extended stop at checkpoint 7 of eating drinking and getting physio, our spirits were strong again as it started to get light and we set off to finish the 100kms.
We came into the finish line at 2.10pm on Saturday, 31 hours after we had started. We were tired, sore and had blistered feet, but were filled with an immense sense of accomplishment and success as we crossed the finish line at Brooklyn on the Hawkesbury.
So how is it like succeeding in an online business?
- The concept of it sounds really good, but the reality of doing it much harder than you could ever imagine.
- You have to do a lot of planning, training and preparation before you even start.
- Whilst you know the general path you are going to take, there are external conditions that you can't control that can make your journey a lot harder.
- It's much easier to do it as a team than go it alone.
- There are lots of ups and downs.
- You need a support crew to help you along the path that can raise your spirits, revitalise you and keep you on track.
- There are some very dark times on the path when you wonder why you got into it in the first place and you don't know how you are going to keep going.
- People are always dropping out. The majority of the people drop out when they have done all the hard work and they are only a short way from the finish line. If they had just have persisted that little bit longer, they would have gotten all the rewards.
- It almost always takes you longer than you thought it would.
- When you make it to the finish line there is an immense sense of accomplishment, gratitude and celebration
- If you get to the start line you are in a minority of the population, if you get to the finish line, you are in an elite group of people.
Your website traffic
Do you know how much web site traffic your web site attracts and you wonder who's coming to your site? Where do they come from? When do they come? How did they come across to your site?
Your website host (or your website developer) should be able to give you fairly comprehensive statistics, but what should you look for.
The key metrics that will be of most use will be
- number of visitors (or sessions)
- number of unique visitors
- the referring websites
- the referring search engines
- keywords used in search engines
- most visited pages
- most downloaded files
If you don't have access to comprehensive stats or the stats package your host uses is a bit limited then you might like to consider Google Analytics.
http://www.google.com/analytics/
Google Analytics helps you find out what keywords attract your most desirable prospects, what advertising copy pulled the most responses, and what landing pages and content make the most money for you.
Google Analytics has all the features you'd expect from a high-end analytics offering. It also provides tightly integrated AdWords support, so you can view AdWords ROI metrics without having to import cost data or add keyword tracking codes.
5 Tips for eMail Marketing
1. Send out your emails with a consistent frequency. Whether this is weekly, fortnightly or monthly stick to a schedule. You will get much more impact from message and your contacts will come to expect and anticipate your emails. We find that fortnightly is the optimal frequency for most businesses, but this can vary depending on the spending habits of your clients.
2. As well as frequency, timing is key with Business Communication. If you send your message over the weekend or late at night, it will then be just one of a number of emails that the reader has to get through in the morning. If you send them on a Tuesday to Thursday between 9.30am and 4.00pm they will be more like to be read.
3. Write content that provides value to your contacts. Your message should have 80-90% of the content being information that is valuable to your contacts that they can use in their business. Only 10-20% of the content should be about your company or your products. If you follow this rule people will continue to read and look forward to your emails.
4. Only send emails to persons you have met or who have requested to receive them. It is much better to have a small database that has grown organically than to have a large database of people who aren't interested in what you have to say. Make the unsubscribe feature easy to find. You will gain nothing by continually sending emails to people that don't want to receive them.
5. Proof your emails. Check your emails thoroughly before sending them out. Once you've sent something to hundreds or thousands of people you can't get it back. Even better get someone else with a fresh set of eyes to check it.
Write your marketing plan in pencil
Today I was emailed a quote from American Rock Star, Jon Bon Jovi – “Map out your future, but do it in pencil.” There have been some great quotes from musicians, but most of them are more humorous than something to live your life by. This quote however was one that I could relate to.
While this quote is about setting your life goals and the future of you as a person, I think it relates equally to your marketing plans and goals.
Many people create a marketing strategy for a one to three year period, create the action plan to implement it, then lock it in. They implement the plan, sometimes getting feedback to see if it's meeting the strategy, never stopping to check if the strategy itself is still sound.
View your marketing strategy as an evolving, living thing. What worked yesterday, probably doesn't work today and what works today, may not work tomorrow.
Every month ask yourself
- Is my marketing working?
- Is my message hitting the right market?
- Is that the market I still want to be in?
- What other markets could benefit from my products/services?
- What problem in my existing markets is not being met?
- Where can I increase my marketing budget to get better effect?
- Where can I decrease my marketing budget without loosing effect?
People are continually evolving. They are learning to filter out blatant advertising and appreciate a more sophisticated information based approach. They want to develop a relationship with you and learn to trust you before they do business with you.
Is your marketing strategy continually evolving to keep up?
7 Reasons why every business needs a website
Websites…”can't live with them, can't live without them.” Well perhaps in a business context it should be websites…”if you want one you need to devote the time and the money to make it work, but you can't afford not to have one.”
What's the first thing you do when you want to find out something about another company, a company that you potentially want to buy stuff off, a company that will become a supplier of goods and services. Usually 2 things
- you look them up on the web
- you ask other people if they've ever heard of them
If your reputation is so good that the phone just rings endlessly with new customers, then maybe you can postpone working on your website, but if not, you bet get moving and make sure your website is working for you.
If you are a micro business and can't justify the budget for a website, have a look at this great article from Seth Godin's Blog.
So here are my top reasons why every small business should have a web site.
Establish Credibility – A Web site establishes you as a professional in your field and helps people to feel more comfortable doing business with you. Perception equals reality and your website helps create the perception of your company.
Enhance Customer Relations – Your website is another office and another shopfront. It is often your customers first port of call, so you can really improve your customer relations by making sure your website helps your customers find what they want and seamlessly makes it easy to physically contact you if they can't find what they want.
Increase Customer Spending – Your office is open from 9 to 5, but your website is open 24×7. Customers like to research, enquire and buy at all times of the day. Particularly if they are in different times zones.
The world is your oyster – The more unique your product or service is, the further a field people will come to buy it. A website opens the door to the entire world.
Gather Customer Data – Collecting information on your customers' tastes and interests is harder to do without a website. Web tracking software lets you see who's been to your site, what they looked at and where they came from. Combine this with a good permission marketing strategy and you can start building a database from which to build an entire eMarketing strategy.
Stand Out from the Competition – A small business can have a website that is as effective as a multinational. The web is a true equalizer when it comes to size.
Drive Traffic to an Offline Location – A website can drive customers to your shop, office, practice or phone number. Just cause your business doesn't operate online it doesn't mean that your customers won't look for you online.
Finally remember that the website is the heart of your eMarketing strategy, but it is still only one part. Don't forget to consider the rest.
Ever organised an event and tried to sell tickets?
A friend of mine, Jay Gaibisso, thought he would get a few mates together to watch Australia play Brazil in the world cup football (soccer) last year and organised a screening at the IMAX in Darling Harbour, Sydney. The night was a huge sucess, with a capacity crowd, but the logistics of selling tickets and collecting money turned out to be a nightmare. From this the idea of Sticky Tickets was born, to help event organisers sell their tickets.
You can see a sneak preview of Sticky Tickets by going to www.stickytickets.com.au, and Jay is kicking Sticky Tickets off by organising a special screening of the new blockbuster Spiderman 3 at the IMAX. If you're in Sydney on the 5th May you should come along and see Spiderman 3 on the biggest screen in the world, just go to www.stickytickets.com.au to buy your tickets.
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23 April 07: Just to let you know, Jay is also organising a screening of the FA Cup Final of Manchester United vs Chelsea. I'm sure there will be some passionate Man United and Chelsea fans queing up to see this match on the IMAX big screen at Darling Harbour Sydney.
