Trish Takes On

Surviving the tsunami of marketing choices

If you have had anything to do with marketing in your business, you likely realized early on that there is a mind numbing number of choices available to you. Between traditional marketing and the channels that exist on the Internet, the range of potential marketing tactics (all with "experts" saying "THIS is the right one! Pay me and I'lll tell you how to do it!) is intimidating as hell.

Take this list, posted on a "virtual assistance" site, which includes a bunch of marketing type items:

• Customer Service/Relations (follow up calls, Email Inquiries, etc.)
• Internet Research
• Document Creation/Formatting
• Product/Service Reports
• Thank You Notes
• Newsletter/eZine Creation/Management
• Email Marketing
• Bulk Mailings
• Article/Press Release/Blog Submission
• Invitations
• PowerPoint Presentations
• Mail merges for letters and labels
• Direct Mail project creation and management
• Collections (calls, letters and demands)
• Follow-up with clients to obtain testimonials.
• Reports and Research (research, writing and compiling)
• Ebook Design and Formatting
• Event, meeting, and seminar planning and advertising
• Desktop Publishing
• Graphic Creation/Manipulation
• Business card Design
• Flyer Design
• Blog Creation/Maintenance
• Simple Website Changes/Updates/Maintenance
• Market Research
• Marketing Assistance
• Google AdWords Campaign Creation/Management
• Search engine optimization
• Submitting your website(s) to search engines and directories
• Brochures Design/Creation

And this is a virtual assistance firm, not a marketing services provider! Step up a notch and you will quadruple this list--webinar production, online advertising, seminar/workshop production, trade shows, conferences, podcasts, radio shows and on and on.

Surviving the tsunami of marketing choices requires clarity, understanding, and patience. Clarity around what results you want to achieve. Understanding of what a candidate marketing initiative requires in terms of resources and tasks. Patience in terms of the time it will take to see a return and also in terms of measuring and making adjustments to improve results.

Integration is also important...whichever marketing tactics you elect to pursue, be sure to dovetail them so that they complement one another.

And if the list you come up with is still long, exercise more patience--select no more than 3 tactics to implement and get going. Master them, get them running like well-oiled machines (which includes having them help increase revenues), then added another one, two or three tactics. If one of them isn't producing the right results, change it or drop it. The point is to do it in chunks and make sure it's working!

Skewering the USP

Today I am going to respectfully take on one of the sacred cows of marketing...the Unique Selling Proposition.

“You must have a USP!” has become a universal chant of marketing consultants the world over, and though their intentions are good, I think that we need to stop and really think about the concept and how it relates to business in a practical way.

As a way of standing out from the competition, the unique selling proposition is a useful concept. Any way you can differentiate your product or service in the buyer’s mind is good. To come up with a USP, you have to stop and think about what you are offering, why customers would buy from you instead of someone else, and how you can best convey those reasons to your market. That kind of strategic thinking is always useful because it is not something we often make time for. So pondering a USP as an exercise to hone our marketing messages is a good thing.

The place where I think many companies get hung up is on the word “unique.” If you believe that you must always have a USP, you are going to have to revise it frequently.

Why?

Because no matter how unique your selling proposition is, if it works, it won’t be unique for long.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about: Many years ago, a man named Montgomery Ward came up with something completely new--offering an unconditional money back guarantee. More recently, a gentleman by the name of Joe Sugarman—who, by the way will be my guest here in a few weeks—also came up with something completely new—the idea of offering a toll free phone number to order products from his catalogs or infomercials. And a guy by the name of Joe Karbo was the very first person to write a “how to get rich” book based on his own personal experiences, and from his own viewpoint.

All three of those examples were unique—in fact, they all caused quite a stir in their respective markets when they were introduced. And they all worked brilliantly to capture sales. As a result, instead of being unique today, all three of those USPs have become common practice.

While that’s not surprising, it does point out that any USP is going to have a finite shelf life. Still, a USP does have a place in the product development process. And for either products or services it can work really well to gain a temporary market lead—until your competition catches up. But creating a USP simply because that’s how it’s done—as many marketers and business owners do—can waste time and resources.

A USP is a revenue-generating tool among many other revenue-generating tools. Use it for a specific product or marketing campaign when you are confident that having one is really going to pay off. Otherwise, invest your resources on other tactics.

Having said all that, I assert that there is one feature that remains unique no matter what—your personality, or, if you want to say it fancy, your company’s culture. The customer’s experience of working with your company will always be different from their experience of working with someone else. There’s no way to replicate that part of the purchase process.

So, though you will gain by applying the USP as a tool for specific marketing campaigns, in the long run your ability to get and keep more customers resides in how you interact with them day after day, month after month, and year after year. Investing time and resources in understanding your personality as a business, aligning it with your market, and expressing it in all your interactions is what will give you the best return in the long run.

"Sez Who?" marketing...do it!!

Subvert the Dominant Paradigm. 

That has been one of my guiding mottoes since I first saw it on a bumper sticker at a street fair stall years ago.

Subvert the Dominant Paradigm. This intentionally fancy pants statement is a way of reminding me to rock the boat, challenge the status quo, and, in my work with clients, to practice what I call “sez who” marketing.

People are rule makers and rule followers by nature. We tend to like our environments organized and reliable, and if things around us are messy and confusing, we get very uncomfortable and will go looking for ways to put things in order.

Marketing is an area that can get messy and confusing real fast. A mixture of art and science, marketing is often attended by a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty. It is also a high-profile expense bucket that may or may not produce the right results. With all the unknowns, it’s no wonder that we look for rules to follow when planning our marketing programs.

And there are rules aplenty out there. There are piles and piles of web sites, newsletters, ebooks, printed books, training courses, and other resources that will tell you how to market in as much detail as your heart desires. And there are loads of companies and consultants offering systems and methodologies that you can follow like cook books to whip up marketing results.

There is nothing wrong with all this—it’s great to have such an extensive resource to draw from when considering your best way forward. But beware! If you adopt marketing practices and methods without first thinking them through for yourself, you may end up with the wrong results at the end of the day.

I suggest practicing “sez who?” marketing. For example...

Everyone knows that a company needs a brochure....sez who?  There might be other materials that will give you a better return on investment than a brochure.

To gain recognition in your market, you need to exhibit at industry trade shows...sez who? You might be way more productive for a lot less money by walking the show aisles, rubbing elbows with your prospects and leveraging your network to gain introductions and arrange meetings.

To succeed today, you need to blog or podcast...sez who? Both of these communication vehicles are specialized and require a steady commitment of time and money to work well. Sure, there might be uses for one or both of these in your business, but you might also be able to succeed mightily without ever starting a blog or recording a podcast.

Here’s one that might sound odd. If you have a business, you must have a web site...sez who? Okay, I admit that I think that there are very few businesses that won’t get big benefits from having an online presence. It’s the word “must” that rings alarm bells for me...why MUST you have a web site? Maybe just having a blog would work just as well or better...

The list of rules and good advice goes on from there, but hopefully you get the picture.

Always ask why? Are there other ways we can do it? Who says we need to do this? And continue to ask questions, even for programs and initiatives that have been around for a while. Test alternatives, consider new approaches, color outside the lines.

Remember—there aren’t really any rules in marketing. Just made up stuff that gets disguised as rules.

By all means, subscribe to the newsletters, read the books, and invite the consultants to pitch to you. While you do this, though, keep an open mind, don’t assume that what worked for someone else will necessarily work for you, and practice sez who marketing any time you find yourself thinking automatically about how things should look.

Just talk plain, please!

I was just on the LinkedIn Question/Answer page, and read responses to this question: Who are the successful marketers of the future? You can view it here.

I was gobsmacked (one of my favorite British terms, sort of meaning "amazed" but much more accurate in nuance) at the responses. I confess, I did not read each one all the way through, but I did scan enough to see a trend that made me want to tear my hair out. Most if not all of the marketing experts who responded sounded like buzzword robots, academicians, or both at the same time.

Paradigm, tipping point, collaborative innovation, viral marketing--ARRRGGHH! People, can we please express ourselves WITHOUT using buzz words?

And the stiltedness of the response made me weep. Most of the responses sounded like something being delivered in a Master's thesis or to a dissertation panel. Very ivory tower, very detached, very impersonal.

Marketing is communicating. Effective marketing is communicating to achieve the desired response. Buzz words and academic gobbledy gook is not the way of the future of marketing. Companies and marketers who insist on clinging to these relationship-disablers will pay a price.

Clients and prospects are looking for conversations with people--even if the conversations are through written materials or online venues. Conversations, even with corporate executives, are natural, sometimes ungrammatical, and personal.

If you have a tendency to use buzz words or get technical and academic in your marketing copy, take steps to fix this. Have someone else review your copy, and be open to their tinkering with it to make it more approachable and less automaton-like.

Why? Because having copy that speaks naturally will stand out from the crowd, will express your brand better, and will connect with your readers more often.  This means that you will have a far better rapport with your market, and your market will be more inclined to take the actions you ask for.

Can the buzz words!!!! Demolish the pedagogery!!!

In the end, it's an imperative for the good of your bottom line.

Darren and Samantha Stevens were never like this!

I'm catching up on the series Mad Men, the AMC original series that has gotten so much attention lately. I was tardy to the party, so have had to rent Season 1 DVDs from Netflix before watching the current episodes accumulating on my DVR.

It's a really interesting series, mainly because of the "social archeaology" of 1960 and into that decade. The subtle contrasts between how things were then versus how they are now are as compelling (maybe more so) than the story lines themselves.

Part of that fascination surely is because of my age. I'm a Boomer, and I was a child in the time frame of the series. I find interests in the series that leave the Gens X/Y and the Millenials bored.

When Betty, the suburban housewife of the high achieving protagonist, sees her little girl with a dry cleaner bag over her head, she scolds the little girl--not because what she's doing is dangerous, but because of what she may have done with the clothes that were originally in the bag. And when Betty has a "spell" that ends with her driving up onto the lawn, her two kids are thrown onto the floor of the back seat--no injuries, but a reminder that seat belts and safety seats are of recent vintage.

Betty's pregnant neighbor girlfriend drinks and smokes along with everyone else. The newly divorced woman down the street (who wears slacks instead of dresses--gasp!) is looked upon with speculation by the men and jealous protectiveness by the women, who are as catty as any human females of any decade.

In the office, Don (our hero) is a chauvinist, though not a pig. He storms out of a client meeting (with a female client), saying, "I won't take this from a woman," or something like that. Secretaries are fair game to the horny guys roaming the aisleways.

Everyone smokes...everyone. The offices of the big guys are fitted out with full bars, and everyone drinks up at regular intervals.

Most of the women--the "respectable" ones--are sexually naive. Betty discovers the joys of an out of balance dryer when she leans up against it to push it back into place. Peggy, Don's secretary, is fascinated by the forbidden fruit offered by a vibrating weight loss belt that may not shed pounds but certainly stimulates in other ways.   

I could go on and on.

It is good to be reminded of how things were not so long ago. It allows me to appreciate the world today, where I have more freedom than my mother ever did--freedom in attitude, social convention--and a lot more choices than she or her mother or grandmother could ever imagine.

A new direction

It's been a bit since I wrote here. Writing my own stuff has always taken a back seat to writing for my clients, and that's just not right. In spite of stiffening my resolve more than once, I have continued to neglect putting my thoughts down here--partly because I kept thinking I needed to have fully formed ideas, topics, thoughts etc. to write about. And because I felt that I needed to always be the voice of authority on whatever I was writing about.

But I don't want to do that any more. I think there is more creativity, innovation, and potential in rough edges, ideas that aren't all polished and done, than in well-crafted words of wisdom. Rough edges are personally risky, I admit. I may look stupid. I may not make sense. I may say something that I change my mind about later. I may look like I don't know.

Well, fine. I've reached a point now where all that ego stuff just doesn't matter all much. Oh, it's still there. It just doesn't matter.

So here I am, in all my stupid glory. Some days I may write something that moves you, motivates you, makes you want to engage in conversation. Other days I may write something boring, listless, and not useful in any way. All days you will get me and my brain, noodling on things that have come to mind and that I want to write about. It may be about marketing--a lot of the time it won't have any relation to marketing at all.

I'm going to have fun with this new direction. And I hope you do too!

News for My Peers-the Solopreneurs

In this case, my peers are the solo small business owners working to grow their work, income, and freedom.

It seems to me that so much attention in the small business media is on the idea of entrepreneurship that the fact that there are other viable choices gets lost. I don't know about anyone else, but I confess that I have no wish to grow a big entrepreneurial enterprise. I'm not that enamored of business for its own sake to find that idea attractive.

I don't want a business empire. I want a place in the business firmament, yes, but when I close my eyes and conjure up my ideal scenario, my active role is that of a highly valued resource for a small elite group of clients. My passive role is more in the mentor mode, providing resources, advice, and (dare I say it?) coaching to other solo practitioners coming up behind me on the path.

Here's a significant part of that ideal scenario: I am alone. Meaning that I don't have employees to manage or an office to run. Instead, I have a robust web of contractor partners that take care of administrative details, overflow work, and support services. And I'm growing the business, making my very ambitious target revenues, and taking time to do lots of non-work stuff.

There's not a lot of support in my current herd for any path other than the multi-million dollar entrepreneur. The business owning sheep that I graze with pretty much all have bought the idea that the only way they get their business-owner merit badge (sorry for my mixed metaphor) is to bust their woolly butts to make the entrepreneurial grade.

And, so, here's another confession: I've been feeling "less than" for not wanting to go that route, confused because I know in my gut that there's another way that will work better for me but not knowing in my brain what it is, and very very shy about vocalizing that to my peers.

And then I ran across Bruce's site and the article linked to the title of this post. Good alarm bells went off for me because he briefly spells out two other choices for solo-owners: virtuoso and solopreneur. While the two are very attractive because they both fit my ideal scenario, I think I like solopreneur the best. That's the route that will let me keep working for many more years without being shackled to the business.

Sadly, it looks like Bruce's site has been dormant for a while. That's too bad. I hope he (or someone else) reactivates the resources and material there. Those of us who prefer the "other two" options need to know there really is another herd out there!!!