Lots of small business owners are intimidated by the thought of marketing their businesses. The buzzwords and flash associated with “marketing” often make embarking on a do-it-yourself marketing effort seem daunting. But don’t let that fear distract you from the goal of educating your customers and potential customers about your business.

In your day-to-day business, you focus on what your customers need and how you can provide them with that.  That is what your marketing should focus on, too. Too many marketing messages focus on the company rather than the customer. So as you craft your marketing strategy and materials, keep the customer top of mind.

Here are some great tips that will help you take that customer-driven attitude and translating it into marketing:

1. Don’t sell. Instead, educate — John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing explains how you can use marketing materials to educate your customers and build trust.
2. Encourage interaction — Small Business Trends Expert Ivana Taylor demonstrates how to create marketing materials that encourage the clients to interact with you.
3. Listen when they do interact — Chanpory Rith of LifeClever outlines how to make sure that your various materials, media and interactions show customers that you are listening when they talk.

Once you’ve mastered that high-level, customer-driven attitude about your marketing, you’re empowered to take the steps to market your business yourself. Here are useful posts on the tactical side of marketing.

1. Free and low-cost tools to spread your marketing message – Angela LoSasso of HP offers a step-by-step walkthrough of ways you can share your customer-driven marketing message, from Twitter to professional-looking DIY templates for business cards, customer kits and more.
2. Lessons Learned From Home-Grown Marketing Collateral — Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends is a marketing expert. But, everyone can learn from their mistakes. Here she shares some lessons she learned from a promotional booklet she made herself and how she improved it.
3. Do’s and Don’ts of DIY design — Chanpory Rith of LifeClever encourages you to DIY … and offers some helpful Do’s and Don’ts.

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HP Creative Studio makes it easy and cost-effective to do it yourself! Check out resources for making your own business cards and business identity kits, brochures and presentation kits and websites and blogs.

Photo Credit: M on Flickr

If you want to develop a solid brand strategy, there are some things you have to do first.  I want to challenge you to focus on these two elements before you even get started with graphic design.  Before you get started on your website or meet with your website guy, you must wrestle with these elements.  And before you start thinking of all the different concepts for a new logo, wait.  To be honest with you, if you can’t answer these questions, you’re not ready to do anything else.  It’s like sitting down with an interior designer to talk about the color of your drapes before you’ve ever met with an architect.

1. You must know who it is you’re trying to reach. Identify this group demographically and geographically. Pinpoint “psychographics” – know well your customer’s likes, dislikes, and how they live and make decisions.

I formerly worked in a French-speaking country of West Africa. In Benin, the common language of all the various people groups was French. But you can guarantee, even among the well-educated (where French was well-spoken), when conversations turned to passionate arguments or intimate conversations, the Africans would break into their own dialect!  It’s there where you can draw from a well of emotions and you can best articulate your pain.  If we had wanted to, we could have chosen to speak in this common “state” language and we might have made inroads into the psyche of a select few. But we were seeking to impact a large number of people, so we were compelled to go deep.  We could not use an interpreter to communicate our thoughts.  We had to invest the time in learning the specific language of these people.  Soon, we learned not only to speak the local dialect but we learned to live and act as closely mirrored to this group that an American family possibly could.  As a result, I believe we made long-lasting and loyal inroads into the lives of the Aja people.

As a small business marketer, you have no choice.  You don’t even have the option of a seeking a interpreter to bridge the communication between you and your customers.  And for most sophisticated consumers, they don’t have the patience, time or loyalty to wait for you to bring someone in to explain your brand to them.  You cannot afford to sit idly by waiting for your prospect to come to you, to communicate on your terms or to try and figure out what your brand is all about.  This violates a core belief of marketing in a 2.0 world.  You must abandon self-serving communication methods that force your customer to communicate on your terms.

2. Repeatedly articulate clearly your core message. Once you identify the pain/need of your targeted segment, you will want to identify two distinct messages that will help you reach this group.

First, it’s your internal message. “We want to be the #1 choice for (your industry) among (specific demographic). We want to blow away (our competition) by (doing something different than your competition).” This is your rallying cry. It’s posted in your employee break room or on a post-it note next to your computer.   It’s the sign above the tunnel that football teams slap as they hit the field.  Ideally, it tears down individual agendas and puts your entire staff on the same page.  It’s the best way to rally your entire operation as part of the marketing team.

Secondly, your external message is developed. This is not necessarily a mission statement because those tend to be mostly about ourselves and offer non-resonating generalities (”We pledge to the best service and best quality for the best price.”). Instead, try articulating a message that resonates with the pain/need of your target market (”We will offer the fastest oil change for Moms and Dads who would rather spend time with your kids than have to mess with automotive repair.”) When you do this, you generate a host of key words and phrases that resonate with your target market. These are words that include their pain, your specific solution, your differences, and their benefit for choosing you. You will use these in ALL your marketing communication so that these keywords remain associated with your brand.  A disjointed message communicates to your target market that you are similarly confused.  But a strong consistent choice of words (and even in your style and design strategy), you will provide a welcoming environment in which your customer feels like they are involving themselves in something that is orderly, valuable, and strong.  That gives your customer confidence and creates a powerful loyalty that keeps them coming back and turns them into powerful advocates for you on the street.

So if you’ve got your web designer and logo guy on speed dial, put down the phone and make sure you answer these questions first.  As a matter of fact, if your web guy or logo designer doesn’t at least ask you about these two questions, you might consider choosing different people to help you.  It says to me that they are more interested in award-winning design for their own gallery than they are about helping you communicate most effectively with your target market.

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Randy Vaughn is a Duct Tape Marketing Coach in Fort Worth, Texas.   While Randy fluently speaks English and the African language of the Aja people, he’d be the very first to invite an interpreter to communicate in French.  “I parlez Francais very poorly,” says Vaughn.

No matter what you want to call it — direct mail, junk mail, circulars, ads, or spam — they all share the same purpose: to motivate you to buy from them. While a lot of what is out there may actually be junk, a savvy direct marketer inspires the recipient to read their ad.

Unlike your brand, which will tell the customer what to think, your marketing strategy must tell them what to do. Before you can effectively do that, you need to know how.

Create A Reaction

If you receive a letter that tells you that you’ve just won something, wouldn’t that motivate you to open it?

Opening the letter is a reaction. By announcing that you might have won something, they have guided that reaction into something that would benefit them. The moment that letter has been opened, they will continue to try and persuade you into doing what they want you to do. That is exactly what you need to do with your own direct marketing materials.

Use Action Words And Phrases

You’ve won a million dollars!!!*

That got your attention, right? It is an example of an action phrase. By telling you that you’ve won some money, your interest has been peaked. The more interested you are, the more likely you are to read on.

You’ll need to prompt your customer to buy what you are trying to sell. If you want to do that, you will need to know the right words to attract their interest. Will they save money if they buy from you? Are you offering them something for free if they choose to patronize your business?

Do not overdo it. Creating action means nothing if it is suffocated by too much information. Tell them what you want to share and offer them a reason to contact you if they would like to learn more.

Do Not Lie

*if we choose you.

Remember that promise for a million dollars? When you open the letter and find that you are only in the running, how do you feel?

Although they didn’t lie, it will still evoke disappointment in the recipient. The next time a letter comes saying you’ve won the elusive million, you’ll be less likely to believe them. After a while that letter might just go straight from mailbox to garbage.

Don’t leave your customer disappointed. If you are going to offer a promise, you need to go through with it. If you promise to give them a free gift when they purchase your product, give it to them. When you lie and disappoint your customer you will only reduce the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

Guarantee Your Product

Everything from infomercials to the local store can offer some sort of guarantee to their customer. Whether is it a money back guarantee or an exchange if the product purchased is less than par. These guarantees make the customer feel secure about what they are buying.

If your customer can feel secure in buying what you have to offer, they’re more likely to spend the money for it. Furthermore, your guarantee shows them that you care.

Last week we conducted a live web panel discussion here – Taking Your Brand Online – with Chris Brogan,[http://www.chrisbrogan.com] Guy Kawasaki [www.alltop.com], David Meerman Scott[www.davidmeermanscott.com] and me as part four of a five part series aimed at helping small business owners get up and running and successfully marketing on and offline.

We always receive way more questions than we can answer during the call so I thought I would grab a few that we did not have a chance to get to and post those answers here.

1) Q: What’s the one advice, one thing you think a small company starting up with social media should do?

A: There really are so many ways to utilize the various social media tools available to the small business, such as blogs, twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, and many people want to jump in and test the waters on all.

However, the first thing you should is listen and watch.In order to learn how businesses are effectively using social media tools, or at least how you might use them, you need sit on the sidelines and observe. One of the best ways to do this is to employ a free tool such as Google Reader and subscribe to a number industry related blogs so you can see first hand how others are using social media day to day.

2) Q: What is the best way to film and get a youtube video on the web?

Youtube actually makes the process very easy. First, of course you need to record and perhaps edit your video and save it one of the more common file formats such a MOV, MPEG4 or AVI.

Then you must create a free youtube account. Once you’ve completed both of these steps you simply login and hit “upload a video” and follow the onscreen instructions. You will have the opportunity to name, describe and tag your video and if you are using this for marketing purposes I suggest you take the time to complete this step thoroughly.

Once you save your upload YouTube converts it to a flash file for viewing by anyone on the YouTube site (unless you make it a private file) and creates code that allows you to embed the video and a video player on your web site or blog.

3) Q: Some Twitterers are unrelenting marketers, and I stop following them.  Any tips on how not to be overbearing, yet still being effective at marketing?

A: Use your own experience as a bit of a guide here. If you don’t receive value in terms of content from the people you follow on twitter most will unfollow.

People build followings on twitter, as they do in many other social media platforms, because the consistently have and share something useful.

That must be your goal as well as you build a following. Once you’ve earned the right to the occasional pitch your readers will allow and in some cases welcome it after you’ve built trust first. Of course, even that trust can be violated if you abuse it.

Also, don’t forget to join me for the next live webinar panel discussion with Ken Yancey, Jr, CEO of SCORE [www.score.org], Tim Berry, founder of Palo Alto Software [www.paloalto.com], and Rich Sloan author of StartUpNation[www.startupnation.com] to talk about starting a business on Wednesday, May 20th at 9am PDT/Noon EDT

Register at the link to the left or here, and you can listen to all past recordings in addition to joining us live on the 20th.

You could take Ji Lee’s simple–albeit a bit risky–approach:

This business card will certainly get you noticed, but perhaps not for the right reasons, depending on what shows up when your name or business is entered into a search engine.

What about a business card that’s so visually engaging that it gives you an opening for your elevator pitch–that bite-sized summary of what your company is all about?

This is what the back of a TrendHunter.com business card looks like. Each tile is an actual image from one of the innovations we’ve highlighted on the site. By pointing to and briefly describing some of our favorites (toupees for babies born without hair and the half-suit for telecommuters are my perennial picks), we’ve introduced our brand, given some teasers and ensured that our business card will stand out from the pack.

At Trend Hunter, we’ve featured a number of other innovative business cards to help businesses shine despite the gloomy economy, from edible business cards to plantable ones. All of them have two things in common: They accurately represent your brand and they allow you to give your elevator pitch every time you meet someone. That’s how to make your business card work for you.

I’ve owned my own business. I’ve helped launch and manage two successful dot-coms (Netflix and CNET).  And I currently work for HP (which is ranked #9 in the most recent Fortune 500 listing). So I’ve seen my share of marketing and brand-building efforts — both good and bad.

Here’s one marketing secret I want to share: You don’t need a dime in your marketing budget to successfully launch and build your brand. You simply need the right resources, a bit of time and the commitment to learn, improve, and share.

Free DIY Marketing Resources

The adoption and acceptance of social media is very good news for small business owners. The quality of marketing expertise that’s available via blogs, communities and online conversations is staggering and could cost you thousands of dollars were you to actually pay for it out of pocket (I did when I had a business).  But why would you, if you can get the same expertise for free (or at incredibly affordable rates)?

Your brand’s “story” (the mission statement, logo, brochure, web site) is often the reason customers decide to spend money with you. Start building the brand story for your business by checking out these free resources:

1. Ask an Expert: Top small business marketing experts such as Guy Kawasaki, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, and Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch share their expertise, strategy and tips to help you develop and evolve the compelling story of your business . Often, you’ll find them on free webinars, too. (By the way, this Small Business Marketing Guide also offers free marketing webinars .) But take it one step further and reach out directly. These experts love to receive comments, questions and participate in conversations.
2. HP Creative Studio:

This 2009 Webby-Award winning site offers dozens of free, professionally designed templates that you can download, customize, and print for your business within minutes, including: Business cards and Business Identity Kits

• Stationery and Envelopes
• Brochures and Business Forms
• Website and Blog Templates

The HP Creative Studio is also a great asset to find tools, access to discounts, and other DIY and affordable design services (such as Logoworks and Stock Layouts)  that professional marketing agencies use every day.

1. Twitter:

Get expert advice, get opinions and share your expertise with world (or just your neighborhood) – in real time.  Any marketing expert worth their salt is on Twitter, and you get their sage advice for free. Better still, many experts will follow you back and respond to your questions. Even better still, when you’re ready to test drive your new marketing materials, the Twitter universe is a great place to ask for feedback and opinions. (Author and marketer Tara Hunt asked her Twitter followers to rate the jacket design of her new book “The Whuffie Factor,” and she got hundreds of opinions plus free designs in response.) Use the following resources to get started and put Twitter to work for you (I’ve also included links to the resources’ Twitter account):

• How to Use Twitter to Grow Your Business (via @Copyblogger)
• 50 Ideas on using Twitter for Business (by @ChrisBrogan)
• We Follow (@wefollow): This is a user-powered Twitter directory that makes it extremely easy to find people by topic, company or interest. (You’ll find me in WeFollow’s HP category.)

Take the first few steps to launch your brand – there’s a world online ready and willing to help. Including me.

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Angela LoSasso manages HP’s Small Business Wiki and writes for the Small Business Marketing Guide and Small Business Marketing Guide and HP’s Small Business Blog. You can also find her on Twitter.

]]> http://www.smbmarketingguide.com/brand-strategy/diy-marketing-how-to-successfully-launch-your-brand-with-no-money-no-agency-and-no-expertise/feed/ 3 http://www.smbmarketingguide.com/brand-strategy/how-to-listen-to-your-customers/?nucrss=1 http://www.smbmarketingguide.com/brand-strategy/how-to-listen-to-your-customers/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 13:23:27 +0000 Chanpory Rith http://www.smbmarketingguide.com/?p=863 ]]> Getting customer feedback is vital to learning how well you’re reaching your customers. Sadly, most companies fail miserably to both collect and effectively respond to customer feedback.

Just think about the last time you made a complaint or suggestion to a big company like AT&T or Comcast. Did you get a lame response like “Thank you, we’ll take your feedback under consideration?”

That scripted response is an important lesson for your small business:

It’s not enough to simply say you’re listening. You actually have to mean it. Then, you have to prove it by taking concrete actions to address the feedback.

Here’s how you can better listen to your customers:

1. Collect feedback

First, collect as much feedback as you can. Feedback comes in two forms: direct and indirect.

Direct feedback is what customers are saying about your company directly to you. To encourage direct feedback:

• Make your email address and phone number easy-to-find
• Answer your phone using a live person
• Respond to every real email and voicemail you get
• Provide a blog/forum on your website for customer feedback
• Conduct a focus group or user study about your offerings
• Participate on social networks such as Facebook and Yelp

Indirect feedback is what customers are saying about your company to other people. To learn what others are saying, you can:

• Google yourself
• Check reviews of your company on Yelp
• Read blogs that likely to cover your business
• Monitor your product reviews on Amazon
• Search Twitter for tweets about your business

When collecting feedback, catalog each issue in some form a database. It could be as simple as a journal, a set of index cards, or a spreadsheet. It could also be as complex as a bug-tracking application. Remember, be prepared for criticism and accept them readily. Don’t ignore negative feedback.

2. Process the feedback

Once you collect enough feedback, you’ll start to notice patterns: the same complaints and feedback will appear over and over again. Organize these issues together and create a list of the top concerns. These are your “high priority” issues list and will keep you on focused on the biggest customer issues and problems. Categorize the remaining issues into “medium priority” and “low priority.”

3. Make real changes

Once you have a prioritized list of customer complaints, it’s time to address each issue one by one by making real changes.

Begin with the high priority issues and think back to your company or product positioning statement. Make changes that meet your customers’ needs while staying true to your positioning. Remember, you can’t be all things to all people. Your goal is not to add every feature requested by every customer. Your goal is to improve the overall customer experience of your target audience.

Once you’ve made significant changes, it’s important to communicate them to your customers. They won’t always notice. You can tell them about changes in many forms:

• an email
• a tweet
• a personal phone call
• a blog post
• a web page update

Communicating changes to your customers completes the feedback loop. It shows you’ve listened to their suggestion, considered the problem, and implemented a change to improve the experience.

What does every business have in common? A brand. It might not be the same for everyone, but it is a strategy they all have to employ at some point. Essentially, it will represent every positive, or potentially negative, thought a customer will have about your company.

Of course no business would want their brand to give people a negative impression. But, what do they want it to say? That’s a question that you need to ask yourself. The actual answer will depend on you.

A good brand is nothing without the right strategy and a good strategy is nothing without the right brand. Could you imagine if Google had gone with a different name?

You might not become the next Google, but you still need to put in the time to build a brand that will do what you need. To do that, you will need to define your brand and, ultimately, define yourself. Start by asking yourself a couple questions:

• What is your mission? What do you hope to accomplish with your business?
• What do you want your customer to think when they think of you?
• What is your current reputation?
• What are your benefits? What are your features?

You need to take this moment and learn about your customer base. What are their needs, wants, and habits? Do not assume you already know, go out there and find out.

Once you have formulated the brand you want, it is time to come up with a strategy. You’ll need to get your new brand out into the public eye and here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Logo The right logo can speak volumes about your business. Allow your logo to represent the message you want your brand to send.
• Tagline The perfect tagline will stick in your customers mind long after they stopped reading it. You want a few words or a short sentence that can tell everyone what you want them to know. Allow it to define your brand for you.
• Integrate You have a brand, use it. Infuse your brand into everything you do at your business, everything from the signature you use in your email to the way you answer your phone.
• Theme While change might be good, in general it is how consistent your look remains that will stick in someone’s mind. This could be the colors that are used on the product packaging or website, the overall look and feel, or even how you place your logo on the product.
• Stay on Track If you stray from your brand’s promise, that sparkling appearance you had will start to fade. Although it might need tweaked as time goes on, don’t allow yourself to go completely off course. After all, that is how your customer recognizes you.

One of the classic mistakes many marketers make is to assume that potential customers inherently care about their company or the product they have to sell. It may sound harsh, but the fact of the matter is that they just don’t. Most customers don’t care about you, your product, your exciting young company or what you have to say.

What do they care about? Solving some problem or meeting some need of their own. But increasingly, they also care about doing business with companies that care about them.

With the economy in ruins and large corporations mostly to blame, consumers are plain-out disgusted with corporate greed. They want companies that give something back, that help them out a little in their times of need, and that give them some flexibility.

In other words, it’s payback time, and what our sister site trendwatching.com calls Generation G is calling on companies large and small to shell out.

Fortunately–as is so often the case–opportunity tends to come hand-in-hand with a new challenge. Corporate generosity is now beginning to be expected, so this is your chance to shine by being one of the first to deliver. Direct marketing is an ideal way to do that.

1. Give generously. Who doesn’t love free stuff? Whether it’s a customized PDF travel guide or ice cream on a hot day, potential customers are unlikely to say ‘no’ to something free, and it doesn’t have to cost you a lot. It also makes your direct marketing effort more than just another easily tossed piece of junk mail–one that can create some warm and fuzzy brand impressions instead.

2. Samples with a twist. Going a step further, you can serve two purposes by making the ‘free stuff’ samples of your own products, or at least some aspect of them. Recession-wary consumers are increasingly reluctant to buy something new without trying it out first, so if you can, let your direct marketing be what makes that ‘tryvertising’ possible. Two examples:

• First Flavor lets manufacturers convert flavors into Peel’n Taste strips that can easily be distributed in a direct marketing campaign. Resembling the breath strips already on the market, First Flavor’s Peel’n Taste strips made their debut back in 2007 in a rum mojito flavor designed to advertise a TV show. The FDA-approved strips contain no sugar or calories.
• London-based Matter has created a new twist on traditional direct marketing by sending out boxes of ‘interesting stuff’ for free to specific audiences. Participating companies create and contribute something that explains what they do, indicates something about their values or can be tried out. Matter then sends the boxes so that they arrive on a Saturday—when targeted consumers are more likely to spend some time with them.

3. Love the Earth. When today’s consumers look for companies that care, that includes caring about the environment. I already offered some suggestions on this in my earlier post, “Do the Green Thing,” and they apply to direct marketing just as well. Generosity is no longer an option, and that includes eco-generosity!

One final note: If you think generosity is something that need only be shown during prosperous times, think again. Much of this depends more on creativity and the right partnerships than it does on shelling out lots of cash; it also stands to make a *much* bigger impression than yet another, bland sales pitch. Be generous and thrive–or, remain stingy and… well, get left in the dust.

If you click on the “Direct Marketing Strategies” tab, you’ll see a ton of great advice on how to boost your revenues through direct marketing.  Here’s an Editor’s Roundup of some of the hottest direct marketing tips from our group of small business marketing experts.

CRAFT A MESSAGE: Joe Costantino offers six rules for creating an effective direct marketing message.

Before you can embark on your direct marketing journey, you have to figure out what message you want to send and what action you want prospects to take. It’s important to remember that people won’t know why they should buy from you unless you tell them.

GET RESPONSE: Anita Campbell outlines four ways to get a high response from your direct marketing efforts.

One of the great direct marketing tips Anita offers is important and often-ignored: “Identify your audience and reach them where and how they want to be reached.” Don’t send a blast to a huge list — through snail mail or online — and then just hope for the best. Determine who you want to reach and do research on the best way to reach them.

MEASURE THAT RESPONSE: Dane Carlson details how to test the effectiveness of your direct marketing through split  testing.

How will you know which methods work and which ones don’t if you don’t actually track your results? Often times minor changes can make all the difference in your direct marketing. Online and offline, there are many ways to track where your customers are coming from.

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The Small Business Marketing Guide, brought to you by HP, features a plethora of advice and resources to help you grow your small business. Check out a special offer from HP good for $100 worth of free postage and supplies from Stamps.com.  And be sure to read expert posts about brand strategy, direct marketing, creating marketing materials, taking your brand online.