I want to let you into a secret. But promise that you won’t tell anyone else, OK? Thanks.

Marketing your business isn’t actually that difficult. In fact, it’s pretty easy. It’s the snake-oil selling ‘gurus’, ‘experts’ and ‘consultants’ out there that trick you into thinking that it’s difficult.

Contrary to what the charlatans tell you marketing a business isn’t about fluff, deception, manipulation, or even money. It’s not about dazzling websites, mega-budget videos, or interruptive marketing, or jargon, or buzzwords. It’s not even about content marketing, or social media.

It’s about the way we feel.

It’s about the way that we, as consumers, feel in response to stimuli. If the stimulation is positive – happiness, joy, pride, hope, etc. then we are predisposed to pay more attention to it. If, however, our reaction is negative – anger, hatred, regret and so on – well, you get the idea.

All of this comes from primeval times, when being able to quickly differentiate between things that are safe (e.g. an apple ) from things that are not (e.g. a saber-toothed tiger) had far bigger implications than whether you’ve wasted money buying the wrong brand of soap powder.

Fight or Flight Business Marketing

Coined by Walter Cannon, a physiologist from Harvard, the “Fight or Flight” response is a intuitive safeguard built into a primitive area of our brains (the hypothalamus, since you asked) designed to help prevent early Homo Sapiens from killing themselves off and making the species extinct before they had the chance to build pyramids, circumnavigate the globe, or design iPhones.

The process happens in a split-second, and is triggered based upon both obvious and subtle clues picked-up by our senses. When invoked, the Fight or Flight response puts us on Red Alert. It causes us to perceive almost anything as a potential threat. We trust nothing and no-one. It’s like we’ve all become TSA officers. In such a heightened state, we’re clearly not in the mood to buy your brand of fabric softener – no matter what it smells like.

OK, so smelling the bovine excrement while watching a bad TV ad isn’t going to make most people lose it and go postal. But every time a potential customer visits your website, speaks with your sales rep, or reads your Twitter update their brain is doing the same thing. They’re trying to figure out – in a split-second – whether your marketing is saying that you’re someone that they can trust, or someone who’s after their money.

“But We’re Good Guys! Anyone Can See That!”

Most business owners are oblivious to how their company is perceived. They think it’s obvious to everyone around how their product / service is better, how their customer service is better, and that customers who bought from the competition were clearly unaware of this.

But guess what? It wasn’t obvious to the customer. They were still trying to work out why your product cost more than the others. They were trying to navigate around your clunky website, looking at your amateurish logo, reading your ineffectual marketing collateral and speaking with your argumentative sales rep who seemed to be suffering from chronic halitosis.

You’re fighting a losing battle. By the time you give your pitch, Fight or Flight has kicked-in and you’re on a hiding to nothing. With luck you’ll be able to turn the situation around with your convincing presentation, client preparation and knock-em-dead product demo. But more likely than not you’ll be going back to the office wondering why they didn’t “get” what you’re about.

Keeping It Real

I’m not saying that the secret to effective business marketing is simply to be everyone’s buddy – although that certainly wouldn’t hurt. Presenting an approachable, genuine brand to prospects can only help create and nurture a feeling of trust and comfort.

It’s more about presenting everything that your customer sees in ways that underline reassurance. Actions and behaviors that present a rich and consistent experience, and that helps them understand (at a deep, almost subconscious level) that you’re unique among your competitors, and that your company is obviously their best choice. Not because that’s what you say. But because that’s how you behave.

So where does your company fit?

The sad fact is that the vast majority of companies aren’t very good at producing marketing experiences that pass the Fight or Flight test. I’ll go as far as to say that I’m betting that your company is one of them. That doesn’t mean that you’re not making money, growing and (as one “almost client” said to me today “we have no shortage of product interest”). It’s less about how many buy, as about how many walk away.

The fix is right in front of you: Talk to the ones that got away.

You need to take the corporate hat off and look with genuine objectivity. Sure, your existing customers are going to tell you that you’re great and the sun shines out of your tushy. But what about the prospects that you lost? What was it about their buying experience that made them go elsewhere?

Maybe your business is thriving. Maybe it’s struggling. Maybe it’s somewhere in between. But ten will get you five that you could better express your business value, using your customer’s own vocabulary, in ways that they find most emotionally assuring.

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Wash, Rinse, Repeat. It’s easy to get complacent in your business marketing.

Post a new blog post here. Update a couple of social media channels there. Send out an email blast. Get a couple of mentions/Likes/ReTweets/Whatever from your audience, participate in the conversation. Repeat ad infinitum.

Soon the tedium sets in. You’re posting/Tweeting/updating because that’s what you think you should be doing, rather than that’s what you want to do. You’re on auto-pilot, doing the same thing over and over again and wondering why you’re getting diminishing returns on what you’re still calling “marketing your business’.

Whether you call it social media marketing, inbound marketing, content marketing or whatever new buzzword some so-called “expert” has coined this month; I’d agree that it’s crucially important to keep the engagement activities regular and consistent. However, there’s also a case for using the regular opportunities that you have to communicate with your audience to refine that communication over time.

It’s less about repetition. It’s more about iteration.

When I say “iteration” I mean doing the same thing again, but refining the process using information on how successful your marketing efforts were (e.g. the level of audience interaction, sign-ups for your email campaign, whatever) to do a better job the next time around. As a result, each time you do the task, you increase the degree of accuracy to hit whatever your calling the target.

“Agile” Marketing

Software developers do this all the time. About ten years ago a bunch of software developers came up with the concept of “Agile Development”. It’s a process of project management where tasks are broken-up into small pieces, and given out to equally-small teams who need to complete their task in a short timeframe. The various pieces are then put back together and tested in collaboration with “stakeholders” (usually, these are customers who’ve agreed to help out). Any bumps in the road are documented and written-up as another “agile task”, to be completed in the future.

You can use an “agile” or “iterative” based process in your business marketing. The concept can be broken down into three components: Awareness, Analysis, and Application.

Stage One: Awareness

You need to be aware of what’s going on around you. What you’re doing, what your competition is doing, and how all of this is being accepted by your target audience. More than anything else you’re looking for problems – things that aren’t working – when you’re implementing your business marketing tactics. This could be something as small as blogging about a subject that your audience has no interest in. Or maybe something larger – a special promotion that doesn’t generate nearly the amount of traction that you expected.

Stage Two: Analysis

I don’t much like the word “Analysis”, as it suggests geeky nerdy types pouring over Excel spreadsheets – and that’s not what I mean at all. Think of “Analysis” as looking at your observations from Stage One and trying to find connections. Perhaps that email blast that you sent out last week coincided with an industry tradeshow or conference – your audience were there, rather than at the office. Maybe your Open Day was organized the week when schools were out, so many people were on vacation.

Stage Three: Application

This is where the heavy-lifting comes in – the actual work. You need to repeat the process, possibly modifying the particular business marketing task based upon the new information that you’ve unearthed, and seeing what happens – in other words Stage One, again. Of course, you also have to be prepared to face the same (or new) problems and thus risk failure again. But hey, no-one said that this marketing stuff was easy, right?

It’s at this last stage that many companies cave in and walk away. Call it persistence, stubbornness or sheer bloody-mindedness, but I believe that you sometimes have to go into something knowing that it will fail, so that you can do it over and make it a success.

As the Chinese proverb says, “Failure is not falling down, but refusing to get up.”

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The old one (you can watch it here) was getting to be a bit long in the tooth. We did it over two years ago, and I think it’s showing its age.

We wanted something more contemporary, and more suited to our focus on providing marketing services for start-ups and SMEs (small-to-medium sized enterprises).

Initial reactions from the people I’ve shown it to have been overwhelmingly positive. Most prefer it to the old one.

What do you think?

You've been reading Marketing for Start-Ups and SMEs: Our New Promo Video by Gee Ranasinha, originally published on Business Value Matters, a business marketing and communications blog produced by KEXINO.

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It’s very difficult to keep things simple when devising a marketing plan for your business.

The temptation is always to tell your audience as much about your product or service as you can. To go into all the minutiae – technical specifications, features and so on.

It’s a natural reaction. You’re living your product / service every day. You’re (hopefully) passionate about why you’re doing what you’re doing, and want everyone to know how wonderful whatever it is that you’re selling. Simplifying things presents a danger that you don’t mention something that you feel is key to their decision-making process. Or that they don’t understand your value offering clearly enough.

The problem is that, by and large, your customers don’t give a stuff.

Customers Don’t Care – As Much As You Do

OK, maybe that’s too hard a statement to make. What I mean is that when marketing your business value to customers it’s imperative to match your communication to their expectations. At the beginning of a customer / vendor relationship prospects don’t want to know about bits and bytes, acronyms, or technology. They might not even want to know too much about all the features – or even the price.

In the old days, and by that I mean anything more than about five years ago, companies could get away with overly-complex marketing content. Prospective customers were willing to act as filters to manually weed-out the relevant information from the fluff, rhetoric, unsubstantiated claims and chest-beating. Today, customers have less patience. Your business might be offering exactly what they’re looking for, but they’re not going to spend their time to find out.

The first thing that they want you to tell them is whether whatever you sell solves whatever problem they think they have. And the faster and more comprehensible you can make that initial value statement, the more likely it is that your customer will hang around to find out more.

The Marketing Bare Essentials

Delivering information to your customers should be thought of in multiple levels. The object is to lead the customer through a path that incrementally delivers on their expectations of the content that they need in order to make a buying decision.

• The first level is to clearly and succinctly tell them whether they’re wasting their time looking at your value offering: does your product / service do what they need it to do. Simple, short sentences that let them know if they’ve come to the right place.
• If you’ve passed that test, that’s the time to give them more detailed information. The benefits expressed as real-world examples, so as to best resonate with their own situation.
• Finally, if you’re selling a technical solution, comes the geeky / nerdy stuff. How it works, why it works this way rather than that way, the tech specs and so on.

Keep It Simple

It’s not about using big words and technical jargon that you, your colleagues and your peers use. It’s about using the words and phrases that your audience use. Don’t think of it as marketing. Think of it as conversation.

Distilling things down to their bare essence isn’t just restricted to marketing content. It should filter through the whole of your business. For example, have you noticed how many companies are simplifying their logos? Look at Starbucks, or Little Chef, or DC Comics.

Or look at the trend in software design to bring things back to basics. You can adorn it with glamorous terms like UI and UX, but at the end of the day it’s about simplifying interaction to the point of being intuitive, almost unconscious.

Less, Not More

As customers, there just isn’t the time (or often the willingness) to engage with everything that’s trying to get our attention. Simple wins hands-down over complexity.

You've been reading Marketing Your Business Means Simplifying Your Business by Gee Ranasinha, originally published on Business Value Matters, a business marketing and communications blog produced by KEXINO.

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The change in the way that customers expect businesses to be is causing a lot of companies to rethink who they are and what they do. Don’t get me wrong, most are not doing it for the love of their customers! They’re doing it because they’re hurting.

Many organizations can see that the path that they’re currently on, with regards to customer interaction and establishing trust, needs work. They’re seeing it manifest in terms of their sales figures, in terms of employee churn, staff morale, and so on.

So Management need to be humble enough to realize that the expertise that they demonstrated to get their job isn’t necessarily the same expertise that’s going to keep them there.

No business is immune. Look at Woolworth’s, or Borders, or Blockbuster, or Kodak. These companies (and a bunch of others) didn’t lose their way because of mismanagement, or corruption, or Act Of God. Their value proposition became outdated and irrelevant to their target customer base because they thought that all that they need to do to continue to be profitable was to nudge the company direction a couple of ticks this way, or that way. What they were too frightened to entertain was that the whole reason that the business came into existence needed to be reevaluated.

If you’re a business owner today, the single most important thing on your mind right now should be focused on how to keep your business value remaining relevant in the minds of your customers. Change is always going to happen. What we see as novel today becomes trite and cliché tomorrow. The challenge is refining your value perception at the pace of change.

One of the problems is that companies who’ve seen the writing on the wall think that “doing” social media is somehow going to make them immune to change. The issue is that, with a (very) few exceptions, they’re not.

Too many times, Social media is being implemented as just another business fad. It’s like having a “brochureware” website in the 90s, or having a “multimedia CD-ROM” to give out at tradeshows. Having a Facebook page, or a Twitter stream, or whatever, isn’t actually any different. It’s a company thinking that they can use technology to implement change. More than that, you can actually be creating more problems using social media channels that you’re trying to solve!

But then do companies even want to solve the problem? There’s an argument to be made that organizations have spent too many years distancing themselves from their customers that, maybe, getting “up close and personal” is too far away from who they’ve become today.

“Distancing themselves” ? Absolutely! We live in a world where companies send out email communication from a “do-not-reply” email address. Where calling a company puts you in front of a robot: “Press 1 for Sales, 2 for Support, this call may be recorded.” On the offchance that you get hold of a human being, they’re often in offshore call centers reading from a script and are rated by how many enquiries / cold calls / support requests they can “close” in a shift.

You want change? Well, change comes from within.

You've been reading Change Your Business? Change Your Perceptions by Gee Ranasinha, originally published on Business Value Matters, a business marketing and communications blog produced by KEXINO.

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In the old days of business, Management’s job was to run the company.

The Engineering department was responsible for inventing the product.

Then the Manufacturing department built the product.

Then the Marketing department marketed the product.

Then the Sales department sold it.

Everyone had their own, very specific (and very insulated) role to play. Not only that, it was easy to blame someone upstream if something went wrong. “Hey, I’m just the marketer! I’m sorry that the wheel fell off, but it’s not my fault!”

Of course, in the old days marketing wasn’t really marketing in the way that we know it now. “Marketing” back then was what we would probably call “advertising” today. The role of marketing was to communicate the values and raise the awareness of whatever it was that the company was selling. Marketing’s existence was pretty much defined as helping salespeople sell. Crucially, marketing was about communicating value after the product or service had been created.

Today, things are different.

Today, prospective customers value a product’s attributes in numerous other ways then just “does it do what I need it to do.” The way it looks, works, integrates and performs. The experience in buying it, owning it, as well as the quality of after-sales service. In short, today marketing has become the actual PROCESS of creating a product or service.

Today, marketing needs to be built in (and upon) at inception, not after the fact. Not only does that mean that the Marketing department needs to get involved at a much earlier stage than before. It also means that R&D, Engineering, Manufacturing, QA, Sales and Customer Service become marketing-driven departments that act – and react – together. They are no longer independent silos with self-determined agendas.

Forget whatever job title your boss gave you. Today, you’re responsible for marketing the product. And so is everyone else.

You've been reading The New Definition Of Business Marketing by Gee Ranasinha, originally published on Business Value Matters, a business marketing and communications blog produced by KEXINO.

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I used to work at a company where the staff meetings were called “Pizza Meetings”.

The meetings were held straight after lunch. To make sure that everyone came, the company would buy us all pizza. We’d munch on a slice or two, chat with colleagues about the day’s events, then head to the conference room for the staff meeting.

The place where they bought the pizzas didn’t offer a huge choice of toppings, so they’d be selection of all the options available. However, of the various toppings on offer the most popular choice (and the one that always ran out first) was margarita pizza.

Pretty much every pizza restaurant or takeaway joint offers margarita pizza. And why not? It’s one of the most popular. It’s also the most inoffensive. And that’s the problem.

Margarita pizza is like vanilla ice-cream, or maybe salted potato chips. It’s a compromise flavor. It’s the one most likely to be accepted by the majority of people.

But margarita pizza is also boring. It’s safe. It’s average. It’s unoffending pizza.

In pretty much every industry that you care to mention, there’s already a company filling the “boring” slot. To clarify, I don’t mean that these are necessarily boring companies (though they may well be). I just mean that the lowest-common-denominator value offering placeholder has already been filled.

The product or service that’s been made to appeal to the widest possible audience already exists. Trying to usurp the incumbent is always going to be difficult, not least because of the banality of the market space – how do you go about positioning yourself as being “more boring than boring”?

Instead, today’s opportunity exists in the periphery. In offering a product or service that doesn’t cater to as many people as possible. It’s about garlic ice cream, hedgehog-flavor chips or mashed potato pizza.

The market-leading companies occupying the middle ground may well have started-off as pioneering mavericks, carving out a space that – today – is seen as grey, trite or conservative. However, their continued success is dependent on them maintaining their average positioning – i.e. catering to the masses. By definition, they’re not in a position to Stand Out.

Which is where you come in.

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You've been reading Selling Margarita Pizza Is Boring by Gee Ranasinha, originally published on Business Value Matters, a business marketing and communications blog produced by KEXINO.

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Clearly, that’s not possible. If everyone was on Page 1 there wouldn’t be any other pages, right? Not only that, but Page 1 is going to be a REALLY long page!

First-page placing on a search engine is the goal of pretty much every business. Appearing on the first page of a search engine result is the way that most business leaders judge the effectivity of their marketing.

SEO Is My BFF

Many organizations spend considerable amounts of money on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of their websites, or using services such as Google AdWords. Now while I’m the first to agree that these things have their place in an online marketing strategy, using such techniques as the ONLY way in getting and maintaining a high search engine ranking is going to fail in the long run.

Why?

Because you’re not just competing for first page ranking with your competitors. You’re competing with your customers. And there’s an awful lot more of them then there are of you.

What do I mean when I say that you’re competing with your customers? Try this little test. Conduct a Google search any of the world’s 50 largest brands. I’ll bet you that maybe as many as 30% of the results that you get back are from websites that have no intrinsic commercial or emotional alliance with the brand in question.

In other words, the search results take the visitor to content that hasn’t passed through the brand’s marketing department, PR agency or any other distribution vehicle where the brand owner has had a chance to approve the content before it was published.

Think about that for a second. Then consider this:

• Facebook is due to hit a billion users by this August. Twitter’s at about 250 million. Social media channels are weaving their way into the fabric of society, culture – and business.
• Customers are increasingly leaving feedback on sites such as Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp and 1001 other places that you haven’t even heard of. Anyone with an opinion (i.e. anyone) can post their view on any product or service. Including yours.
• Study after study shows that consumers take notice of peer reviews – often even more than they do of the more “official” review sites.

That means that your customers – whether they’re delighted, frustrated, annoyed or pissed-off – could be talking about you, with the entire world listening in. Including Google.

What do you do about it? How about:

Create a listening/monitoring plan

According to a survey from Maritz Research and Evolve24, 70% of companies ignore customer complaints posted on social media channels, which is deplorable.

You don’t just need to not only know what’s being said about you. You need to know when – and how – to respond to it. The same survey found that 83% of people who complained either liked or loved the fact that the company bothered to respond.

Create content

I’ve been saying this to just about anyone who’ll listen for the past four years: The only way you are going to tackle user-generated content is by creating content of your own. There are many ways to do this effectively – online video, eBooks, blogging, social media marketing, etc. Unless you contribute content to redress the balance, you’re on a hiding to nothing.

Share and connect

It’s not (nor should it be) just about your own efforts regarding the creation and distribution of your content. By creating alliances and collaborations you build a network that will help you introduce your efforts to the world.

Get involved. Develop your content strategy and appoint someone – hopefully us – to help create, administer and deploy it.  Don’t try to go up against your customers when it comes to content for web search results. You haven’t a hope of winning.

You've been reading Trying To Out-Google Customers: Why You’ll Lose At Web Search by Gee Ranasinha, originally published on Business Value Matters, a business marketing and communications blog produced by KEXINO.

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If you haven’t, then watch this (real) video ad for Dollar Shave Club (if you can’t see the video above, then click here). Not only does it feature the actual company CEO, Michael Dubin. The video – which cost just $4,500 to make – was used to help secure venture capital financing from big-name companies such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz!

The results so far have been staggering. In the first ten days Dollar Shave Club signed-up 20,000 subscribers. In less than a month the video has been seen 4 million times.

The company is on target to secure more than $50 million in sales in the first twelve months of trading. This is in what most people would agree is a mature industry, dominated by 2 or 3 major players. They’ve done this in a commodity market space with zero marketing budget, sales staff, distributors, resellers, print or TV advertising.

Regardless of how well (or otherwise) Dollar Shave Club does, the big guys have been caught napping. An unknown upstart has come along and not only disrupted the established business model (sell the razors cheaply, charge a fortune for the blades). But they’ve communicated their business value in a way that cannot be ignored. Dubin used to be a digital marketing director at Sports Illustrated. Clearly his experience has been put to great use.

Dollar Shave Club dared to Stand Out. They realized that playing it safe was tantamount to commercial suicide: a new business model isn’t always enough. They’ve single-handedly changed marketing for an entire industry that’s been doing the same thing over and over again for more than half a century.

The Best A Man Can Get? Yeah, right. You can bet that Gillette and the rest are going to be watching very closely over the next few months. This could be the iPod vs. the Walkman all over again.

You've been reading Dollar Shave Club: Definitely Standing Out by Gee Ranasinha, originally published on Business Value Matters, a business marketing and communications blog produced by KEXINO.

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As we know, being seen as “average” doesn’t cut it any longer. Mediocre, gray, typical, usual. Maintaining the status quo no longer works when marketing your business.

Today it’s about Standing Out, not fitting in. It’s the only way that your customers can see you.

In which case, why do so many businesses choose to blend in, rather than Stand Out?

One word: Fear.

People are afraid to Stand Out. Why? Because Standing Out means that there’s a chance (actually more like a certainty) that some people won’t like you. Because we’re brought up to try to please all of the people all of the time, Standing-Out frightens us. As a result, instead of making our business / product / service different in a marketplace full of me-too’s, we choose conformity.

The problem is, that in today’s commercial environment, fitting-in equates to disappearing. If you don’t Stand Out, then you’re invisible.

One of my friends runs a restaurant in the center of Strasbourg. It’s a pretty famous eatery for the area that offers fantastic food, yet my friend is thinking of selling-up as she’s not generating much business since the economy nose-dived a couple of years ago.

She thinks that the reason is purely economic. Talking to other restaurant owners in the area, they all say that business is a lot tougher than it used to be.

Within a half-mile radius of her place there are perhaps fifty other restaurants. Together, they offer diners a wide variety of cuisines to choose from – French, Thai, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Indian, Laotian, North African, etc. While I’m sure that the food is pretty good at most of these places, none of them Stand Out – and that includes, unfortunately, my friend’s restaurant.

Why? Because after spending all the time, money and effort in opening and running a restaurant, the last thing that most business owners want to do it take “another risk” (her words, not mine) by Standing Out.

Standing Out, Not Fitting In

A run-of-the-mill restaurant might not make the front page of the local news site, but there’s also less chance that someone will slag it off. The food might not being anything to write home about, but you won’t get sick if you choose the Seafood Special.

The problem is that, while the food might well be “OK, I guess…” it’s not exceptional enough to get you to post a review on Yelp, or post a picture of your main course on Facebook. You won’t recant the story of the fantastic service that you got from your waiter, the reason why the walls are painted with pink stripes, or the collection of Zippo lighters in a cabinet by the washrooms – or whatever the Stand Out features are.

Instead, you get Average. Acceptable service, conventional decor, decent-enough food, but nothing that’s going to stop traffic. It’s no wonder that all the restaurants in the area are finding business tough: They’re all seen as shades of gray.

OK, so if playing it safe is risky, and Standing Out is the only option, how do you know what ideas are going to work and which are going to tank?

You don’t. (Hey, no-one said that business was easy, right?) You don’t know if your idea is going to work until you try. But that’s the whole point. If it was predicable, then it would be “safe”. If it’s safe, then it’s not Standing Out.

One thing’s for sure: “Average” is the new “Risky.” Playing it safe is actually not safe at all.

You've been reading If Your Business Doesn’t Stand Out, it’s Invisible. by Gee Ranasinha, originally published on Business Value Matters, a business marketing and communications blog produced by KEXINO.

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