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Aggressive Small Business Marketing & Advertising
Big thoughts, ideas and how-tos for aggressive, fast-growth businesses and the entrepreneurs who fuel them.
Being under-stimulated by advertising
Posted by Michael Cage on Monday, September 25, 2006A post from Jim Logan, which I both agree and disagree with:
We are over stimulated with advertising - seeing, reading, and hearing it everywhere we look and listen. We turn it off. Most is ignored. It's not enough to have a full page add with a great logo and cleaver tagline. You need to offer more.
Sure, you can spend enough money to get noticed, if you have enough money to spend. But you don't. So, you need to work differently. Odds are your product or service needs to be put in the context of a great story. Great stories are hard to ignore and even harder to hold secret. They beg to be told.
Our task is to capture the things we do and the way we do them and turn them into stories that attract customers and excite them. We can't take the chance on being seen. We don't have the time or money for that to happen.
I believe we are under-stimulated by advertising.
As Jim pointed out, we have learned to tune out messages that don't demonstrate immediate relevance to what is happening in our lives. It's the same mechanism that allows us to function with billions and billions of pages of information (the Internet) available when it didn't exist a little over a decade ago. This is as it should be. We could not function without it.
Where most small businesses fail at marketing can almost always be tracked back to two things: a) they have not thoroughly identified and understood a unique target market and/or b) they are not directly addressing a top 3 problem or goal that market has.
Jim mentions having a great story ... and I agree ... but what will make that story stick out and grab your market:
- You should have a deep, empathetic understanding of the top 3 problems and goals your market has.
- Your story should connect the dots between one of those problems or goals and your offer.
A great story that is not relevant will be ignored.
There are 0 comments, add your own!Job #1 when marketing to small businesses
Posted by Michael Cage on Monday, August 28, 2006Three professional service businesses with the same marketing problem, only they don't know it:
- An accountant offers an amazing tax planning service for fast-growth start-up businesses ... and FAILS.
- A marketing "expert" has a system to increase repeat sales ... and CAN'T GET A SINGLE CLIENT.
- A web design firm knows they can build web sites that increase small business sales ... but CAN'T GET ANYONE TO LISTEN.
What's the problem?
Your first job when selling to a small business entrepreneur isn't to convince them how wonderful your product or service is. It isn't to tell them how your product or service will solve a killer problem or help them reach an amazing goal.
Nope.
Small business entrepreneurs work haaaaaaaard. Many believe they need to do anything and everything in their business. They try to pack 24 hours of work into an 18 hour day. Most are too busy to even think about how to reduce their workload and increase their efficiency.
Now, all of these things are enormous mistakes. But they are common mistakes. And if you are selling to small business owners and entrepreneurs ... this is the mindset you must a) be aware of and b) address going in.
Your first job is to understand the lives and businesses of the people you want to have buy from you ... the chaos and the turmoil and the frustration and the dreams ... and then, you must convince them that the most important thing they can do right now isn't put out the 97th fire of the day ... it is to step away from what is happening in their business and learn about what you have to offer them.
If you are thinking you'd better have one hell of a compelling message to do this, you are right. It's also why most marketing to small business owners and entrepreneurs falls flat on its face.
There are 1 comments, add your own!Calacanis on reinventing yourself
Posted by Michael Cage on Wednesday, August 09, 2006A transcript from a podcast with Jason Calacanis, Doc Searles and Dave Winer, emphasis mine:
You tend to fall in love with your first brand, and you can't let it go. And I did that with Silicon Alley Reporter magazine, and it's well documented that I could have sold it for 20 million bucks, and I didn't, and I got a fraction of that [when I eventually sold it], and then when the next [opportunity] came around, Weblogs, Inc., I sold it after 18 months, instead of holding the other brand [Silicon Alley Reporter] for six years, and I did much better in 18 months than I did in six years...
You have to always be confident that you are able to create another hit, you're not a one-hit wonder, and that your future is always brighter than your past. You can't live with this fear of losing this monster you created. And sometimes you gotta kill it, and I always give people the example of Bob Dylan, because when Bob Dylan took folk music as far as his interest in it...could go and then he said, "I want to do electric, it's more interesting to me," and there's that famous thing at Royal Albert Hall where somebody yells at him and says, "You're Judas," and [Dylan] says, "I don't believe you, you're a liiiiiiar," [laughter] and then he turns around to his band and he says, "Play real fuckin' louuuuuud," and then he turns around and he plays "Like a Rolling Stone," which is arguably his best song ever and he did some of his best work after that.
You have to reinvent yourself, and sometimes you have to kill your previous persona. I had to kill [my] Silicon Alley Reporter persona to become Weblogs, Inc. I'll have to kill Weblogs, Inc. to be Netscape, kill Netscape to be whatever comes after that. You can't live on your past brand, or else it owns you, and you no longer own it.
Links: the MP3 of the podcast, the original transcript of the podcast from Ed Batista, Jason comments.
There are 0 comments, add your own!How to grab and hold attention in an attention-starved world
Posted by Michael Cage on Monday, August 07, 2006It seems the latest trend is to declare the long marketing message dead. As "proof" ... people cite shortened attention spans, increased multi-tasking and an "immunity" to advertising.
Have you ever rented a movie that was so bad you stopped watching 15 minutes in? Would it have mattered whether it was only 90 or 60 or even 45 minutes long? Of course not, the moment you know you aren't interested you shut it off.
Have you ever started watching a movie and ... two hours later ... you are left emotionally touched and wondering where the time went? Would it have mattered whether it was a 3-hour epic? Of course not, when you are emotionally involved ... there are few limits to the time and energy you'll put into it.
Hollywood producers understand that they need to capture ... hold ... and consistently re-engage your core emotions to hold your attention throughout a movie. A marketing message is the same way.
There aren't many good Hollywood producers. I believe there are even fewer really good marketers.
If your people don't have the attention span for your messages ... the answer isn't to shorten them. No matter how short they get ... you've been told, loud and clear ... that they are not compelling enough. The answer is to drill down to the emotional core of who you are and what you do ... and where those things intersect with the desires of your market ... and then communicate that in the most powerful and compelling way possible.
Quit taking the lazy way out.
Quit blaming the market.
Quit blaming THEM for not sitting through a boring message about why YOU are so great.
You have met the enemy ... and he is you.
Update: Timely post, it seems. The RainMaker Maker (not a typo) adds/points to additional thoughts from Seth Godin.
There are 0 comments, add your own!A passed up business opportunity?
Posted by Michael Cage on Monday, August 07, 2006Dane Carlson at the Business Opportunities Weblog invited me to participate in his "30 Second/One Question Interview" series.
His question?
One man's trash, is another man's treasure. What product or service have you imagined would be a good business opportunity, but you've rejected because it's too off the wall?
I have to admit, I had some trouble with this question.
Everytime I thought of a crazy business opportunity that I passed up on, I found someone ... somewhere ... who was doing it anyway. So, and I hope Dane won't mind this, I'm going to answer with the business opportunity I rejected that I wish someone in my area would execute really well.
One of the biggest trends of the last decade has been the emergence of the "mass affluent." Households bringing in 6-plus-figures per year, who are willing to pay premium prices for specific experiences. In this group you have a healthy number of small business owners, dual-income professionals and others who share the following traits:
- They are short (or worse, negative!) on time
- They don't want to (or don't have time to) handle household errands
- They have an excess of money available for the right services
Businesses that serve people who will happily trade money for a little more free and/or productive time are poised for enormous growth now and in the future. After all, if it's a choice between paying an extra buck or two per shirt for dry cleaning or having an extra half hour with little Johnny and Susie ... is there really any competition?
I'd happily, eagerly and repeatedly pay a service to come pick up a week's worth of errands (purchases to pack and return, dry cleaning, car detailing, grocery shopping by someone who knows how to pick good fruits and veggies, prescriptions to fill, tickets I want) and who can refer/arrange every possible service I need (a handyman to move stuff to/from the garage, mobile pet groomers, painters, etc.)
In my area, I can get any one or two of these things from a service or two. Having a single "go-to-person" ... one point-of-contact ... who could handle the most common household issues or refer me (and handle the arrangements) to someone who can, would be worth a substantial premium on a continuity basis.
By the way, there is plenty of opportunity for profit here. Get in the right community, and the business will rage by word-of-mouth. It is not a price-sensitive market. A good concierge could charge a retainer plus broker deals with the services they work with to a) deliver a discount to the concierge clients and b) provide a kickback to the concierge. The key to making it work is someone running it who doesn't only follow directions well, but who can also anticipate needs and proactively recommend solutions. I dream of this person, surely others must, too. 
Thanks for including me, Dane, I appreciate it. Hope my answer was helpful.
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