By Mark Smiciklas

I just started reading an advance copy of Tuned In, a new book by David Meerman Scott, Craig Stull and Phil Myers that is due to hit stores in July. Tuned In offers up an in-depth six step process that helps businesses understand and connect with markets in order to provide products and services that customers really want.

The first step in the process flushes out a point that I feel is very important to small business owners and managers: "The critical first step to becoming tuned in is to understand, in great detail, what existing market problems your organization could solve. The only way to accomplish this is to get out of your office."

More and more, online communication is becoming the business norm. Tools such as email, BlackBerry, teleconferencing, web meetings and video conferencing have provided small business owners with the opportunity to become much more efficient. When is comes to developing relationships and really understanding how to provide solutions for your market, is electronic communication the best way to communicate with customers and potential clients? 

Case Study

A software company I work with has clients that they have never met. They promote the application via their website and other online marketing channels, conduct product demonstrations online, submit proposals and negotiate contracts by email, administer training and support via webex & teleconference and troubleshoot via the internet.

Although their business model is successful, they recognize the relationship building power of face to face communication and incorporate visits and meetings with clients into their schedule and budget. Their strategic plan involves splitting up relationship building duties amongst the team – each person is assigned a list of customers/prospects to visit on a quarterly basis.

Meeting face-to-face has become an important way for this small company to gain an in-depth understanding of their clients and the challenges they are facing. Leaving the office to go visit customers and prospects has become an integral part of their research and product development process – face to face communication has helped paved the way for market driven features and solutions.

Balanced Approach

Electronic communication is a part of day-to-day life and has become a critical tool for small business owners and managers. But it's also important to recognize the benefits of face to face communication and how getting out of the office to go visit clients/prospects will help your small business connect to the market. Get "Tuned In" by incorporating market visits into your strategic plan – it will build relationships, fuel innovation and help differentiate your small business brand.

By Mark Smiciklas

Building a unique small business brand requires some courage. Why are unique brands so scarce while middle of the road products, services, retail stores, etc dominate the business landscape? My theory is that it has something to do with an innate fear (we all have) of being different. In a branding context, this poses a problem because differentiation is one of the key elements in the development of a great brand. So how do small business owners face the fear of differentiation?

The Opportunity Cost of Being the Same

One way to challenge the fear of being different is to try to understand the consequences of “being the same”. One differentiating decision a small business has the opportunity to make involves product/service mix – the common fear being specialization (and missing out on potential sales).

Example: If your market has a number of other “one stop shops” the decision to offer a little bit of everything to a mass market may be riskier than specializing and offering a limited product mix to a market of enthusiasts. As a small business owner or manager, you should challenge the fear of differentiating your product mix by assessing the risk of blending into the landscape and becoming “invisible” to your target market.

Subtle Differentiation

Small business owners might believe that differentiation needs to be extreme in order to be effective – fearing brand alienation as a result of trying to act/behave way outside the norm. Understanding that subtle differentiation can be a successful way to separate your brand will help your small business face this fear.

Let’s look at my small business, Intersection Consulting, as an example. My brand differentiation strategy is far from extreme and includes:

• focusing on small business
• specializing in marketing
• offering a casual, no-nonsense approach

The last point of differentiation is the most important to my brand because it generates word of mouth and referrals – yet it is the most subtle because it is only visible by clients after they meet with me and engage my services. Ultimately, your brand still needs to be a natural extension of you, your personality, core values and skill set – trying to differentiate your small business brand to the point of losing authenticity is never a good strategy.

“The Edges Usually Pay Off” (Seth Godin)

Don’t be afraid to have a small business that is different – Following/chasing the masses is not always the best strategy. Seth Godin puts this into perspective with a great analogy in a recent post about Danny Devito and George Clooney…”Because everyone in Hollywood is trying to be George, there are a lot more opportunities for the few Dannys willing to show up. Invest in Danny. The edges usually pay off.”

By Mark Smiciklas

This post was inspired by the great image below designed by David Armano.

The process of developing your small business brand is made up of a series of steps – interdependent and progressively connected. Each step…

1. requires cultivation over time
2. represents an important brand building opportunity
3. needs to be achieved in the eyes of your customers before you can proceed “up the ladder”

Positive Interactions

Your brand story begins with the interactions your small business has with all its stakeholders (customers; employees; vendors; volunteers, etc). Positive interactions that take place across all touchpoints accumulate to form positive customer experiences. Let’s use the telephone customer service touchpoint as an example:

• every time a customer calls your small business they get to speak to a “live” person
• that person always has great phone manner and has been provided with the tools to help
• over time these individual customer service calls accumulate into an overall positive brand experience for that customer

As a small business owner, it’s important to understand the cumulative impact of those hundreds/thousands/millions of individual communication opportunities – embracing the philosophy that every interaction is important will help lay the foundation to build a great brand.

Consistency

Engaging in positive interactions at every opportunity, across all touchpoints, is the next step to brand greatness. Repeated positive interactions add up to an overall brand experience and form the basis for developing loyalty for your small business brand.

Case Study: WestJet

• Touchpoint: Telephone Customer Service
  • Interaction: friendly; helpful; genuine
• Touchpoint: Website
  • Interaction: easy to use; convenient; reliable; fast
• Touchpoint: Airport
  • Interaction: flights are on time; friendly check-in
• Touchpoint: In-Flight
  • Interaction: free TV; fun; casual; relaxed; friendly

Credibility

cred-i-bil-i-ty: 1. the quality or power of inspiring belief; 2: capacity for belief

credibility gap: 1. lack of trust; 2. lack of believability (Source: Merriam Webster Online)

Seeing/experiencing is believing – An ongoing series of consistent and positive interactions will “inspire belief” in your small business brand.

Authenticity

The ongoing engagement of consistent, positive interactions with your stakeholders begins to formulate your brand culture – an honest representation of your small business beliefs and values.  Michel Hogan does a great job explaining the “authentic brand” in her manifesto We Need a New Word for Brand:

“Authentic brands are not about marketing. They are not products. They live inside the company. And they are held and enacted of the people, by the people and for the people!…your brand acts as the foundation of your company. Its principles are the framework for thought and action by everyone in the company. Without it there is no consistency, no alignment between what you say and what you do, no synchronicity between who you are inside and the way you present yourself outside. You may ask—“well isn’t that the same as culture?” The answer is
yes and no. Authentic brands are in many ways the identity of the company culture. They help that culture become visible. They also embody the values and purpose of the company, giving all these things a face and a voice that can be seen and heard by everyone the company touches.

Authentic brands live or die with the people in the organization. If they don’t believe the brand, if they don’t feel it is their cause, no campaign or change program on earth will help it succeed. Authentic brands feel natural. There is no need to “educate” the employees—they feel it immediately. There is no need to launch the “new” brand on your unsuspecting customers—they have known it for years. When you are doing it day in and day out, saying it becomes almost superfluous.

This is exactly why you should want to find your authentic brand. Just imagine a brand that is enduring, that lasts beyond the next ad cycle, that is sustaining and sustainable, that feeds the soul of your company and makes the whole stronger. Imagine a brand that doesn’t cause disharmony inside your company, that doesn’t cause friction with the way you already do things.This is an authentic brand!”

Trust

As your small business brand develops, it instills a level of expectation from your stakeholders (brand promises). Your brand “keeps its promise” by consistently exceeding the expectations of your customers, employees and vendors – the foundation of building trust.

Loyalty

Trust leads to loyalty – the pinnacle of any brand. Brand loyalty is demonstrated in some of the following ways:

• Customers become dedicated to purchasing your product/service over that of the competition
• Customers express a desire to promote your brand though Word of Mouth
• Brand forgiveness – customers choose not to dwell on the occasional service gap and continue supporting the brand. (Note: Be careful not to take advantage of the loyalty customers have bestowed upon your brand. Although it takes a long time to build, brand equity can erode very quickly if you begin breaking brand promises)
• Customers will likely pay higher prices for your products/services

by Ryan P. M. Allis

According to a study by the Winterberry Group, email marketing brings in $15.50 per dollar spent . This is about 17% more than direct-mail campaigns and 73% more than telemarketing campaigns. In short, email marketing matters and if you’re not sending out at least monthly email newsletters to your subscriber base, you should be. The true cost comes from acquiring the prospects and clients, not the three or four hours
needed to create a monthly newsletter.

Many organizations, once they have spent the thousands of dollars acquiring their clients, fail to market to their existing base. I’ve met quite a few marketing managers who would rather continue spending $200 a pop for new qualified prospects rather than $0.01 per person to build the relationship with their existing clients and recommend new products or encourage re-orders. I’ve found that sending relevant email
communications to persons who have requested to receive them is the single most effective way of cultivating the type of relationship needed to turn your prospects into customers and your customers into
lifetime product evangelizers.

As a reader of this article, chance has it that your organization is one that already sends out a newsletter, or at least is considering doing so soon. Once you began sending your own newsletter, however, it is important to follow two important rules that will increase your likelihood of achieving your marketing goals, whether they are to increase repeat orders, convert a higher ratio of prospects, or obtain top-of-mind
brand awareness.

The first and most important rule is to only send relevant content to persons who have requested it. What does this mean? Well, let’s say you are a travel and adventure planning company. If someone has subscribed to your Kayaking Monthly Newsletter, don’t move them over to your European Vacations list and send them an article on Dining in Tuscany. In most cases, you will very quickly lose any prospect or reduce the lifetime value of your relationship with an existing client. If the person also subscribed to it, it would be okay to send him or her a monthly company newsletter that from time to time had information on other topics, but don’t mix newsletter bases just to increase mailing volumes.

It is important to note that just setting up an interest segment and adding it to your sign up form doesn’t require you to create a monthly newsletter on that topic, but once you get a few dozen to a couple hundred people interested in that area (depending the value of the product or service you are providing), it will likely pay to have quality content developed on that topic for distribution in interest specific newsletters. This can be easily done within the iContact email marketing software by either creating a list specifically for persons
interested in a topic or creating a segment of persons with a specific interest.

The second rule is to be consistent with your sending frequency. Depending on your type of business and
your subscriber interest level, the right volume for you could be weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Once you find the frequency that is right for your organization (and this could vary newsletter to newsletter), stick with it. We see a lot of companies whose email strategy can only be defined as “ad hoc.” Rather than blasting out a promotion whenever sales are lagging, we recommend having an emailing schedule for each newsletter and sticking to it, whether it be every Saturday, every other Wednesday, or on the 15 th of each month. As an example our company newsletter, the Permission-Based Email Marketing Monthly goes out on the 28 th of each month.

What type of results can you expect from regularly sending out regular email newsletters? Here are two examples from users of iContact the email marketing software my company Broadwick provides. Biotage is a company based on Massachusetts that provides DNA sequencing instrumentation. They send out event notifications and company updates to 20,000 or so subscribers each month. David Shultis, Marketing Communications Manager of Biotage, notes, “We’ve seen open rates at around the 38-42% mark for our large mailings. There has also been a ‘pass-along’ quality of our emails, as we’ve noticed new names that were not originally on our mailing lists responding to offers.” Another iContact user, Julie Ibrahim, Vice President of the Tiger Sports Shop says “The monthly newsletter keeps us and our inn at the forefront in the minds of our
past and potential guests. Thus with the continuous news from us and our region, we are kept in mind, with no sales effort or pressure.” If your organization wants to see marketing results like these, it may be time to start or expand your usage of permission-based email marketing.

If you stick with sending relevant, high quality content-rich emails on a consistent basis to persons who have requested to receive your emails, you will increase your prospect to customer conversion rates and
customer lifetime value at a fraction of the of the cost of traditional methods and take advantage of the best type of marketing possible—free marketing through authentic customer word-of-mouth.

Ryan P. M. Allis is the CEO for Broadwick, Corp. Broadwick offers the leading permission based email marketing software, iContact. We Simplify Email Marketing.

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