A little exercise……Sit down with two or three colleagues (preferably motivated ones) and launch informally into a discussion around:

WHO ARE WE?

WHAT DO WE STAND FOR?

HOW DO WE STAND OUT FROM OUR COMPETITORS?

WHAT EXPERIENCE DO WE WANT OUR CUSTOMERS TO HAVE?

Honest answers only please! With those same two or three colleagues map out what a great (the business your’e in) would look like? What should it feel like when customers engage with you? Make a list of what you need to do, then go ask some of your clients the same thing…….

On this hot, sunny day in the UK, I’m cheating on my blog today but then Seth Godin is just saying what’s key in marketing and as always I couldn’t have put it better myself. He has just posted a blog that is cut and pasted below: (it’s okay he is allowing people to do it!) I particularly like the one about static marketing budgets! For further information on Seth go to www.sethgodin.com

What Every Good Marketer Knows:

• Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.
• Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.
• Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.
• Share of wallet is easier, more profitable and ultimately more effective a measure than share of market.
• Marketing begins before the product is created.
• Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.
• Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing, though, that’s efficiency.
• Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.
• Products that are remarkable get talked about.
• Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your returns policy.
• You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.
• If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers realize that it is an investment.
• People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
• You’re not in charge. And your prospects don’t care about you.
• What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.
• Business to business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for what they buy.
• Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (TV ads, trade show booths, junk mail) are losing their cost-effectiveness. At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based RSS information, consumer fan clubs) are quickly proving how well they work.
• People all over the world, and of every income level, respond to marketing that promises and delivers basic human wants.
• Good marketers tell a story.
• People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
• Marketing that works is marketing that people choose to notice.
• Effective stories match the worldview of the people you are telling the story to.
• Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.
• A product for everyone rarely reaches much of anyone.
• Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in an conversation-rich world.
• Marketers are responsible for the side effects their products cause.
• Reminding the consumer of a story they know and trust is a powerful shortcut.
• Good marketers measure.
• Marketing is not an emergency. It’s a planned, thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn’t end until you’re done.
• One disappointed customer is worth ten delighted ones.
• In the googleworld, the best in the world wins more often, and wins more.
• Most marketers create good enough and then quit. Greatest beats good enough every time.
• There are more rich people than ever before, and they demand to be treated differently.
• Organizations that manage to deal directly with their end users have an asset for the future.
• You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.
• You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support and you market every time you send a memo.
• Blogging makes you a better marketer because it teaches you humility in your writing.

I know it’s easier said than done but by following just a few of his principles you might find your marketing works better. In my e-book I talk about some similar things. For a free copy go to www.clarityprojects.co.uk

Abandon everything you have been taught about marketing before. Take a cold quantitative look at your marketing activity and start again. All marketing should bring a return on your investment. Break from the past and think about:

- Beginning again – I feel a truly clean sheet of paper works well

- Start solving the root cause of why your marketing is not working as well as it should

- Create a strategy, yes I know it’s dull, but it will help shape your marketing and keep you on track when it inevitably gets tough

- Put a budget aside, you are going to need it

- You don’t need ten goals, two will do. But make sure they are the ones you can over commit to. If you do this, how successful would your business be?

Don’t be fooled, changing the marketing of your business is not going to be easy. You need a new marketing framework that will help you make sense of a new business environment where success is judged less on complex, sophisticated, financially driven factors and more on humanised customer relationships and new ideas that not have been used in the past.

For further marketing rules go to www.clarityprojects.co.uk and download the Marketing Rule Book. Hope you find it useful!!

I recently had a great discussion with my delegates at a recent seminar I held. One of those challenging ones that shifts’ everyone’s thinking. As a group we talked about how we often fear customer rejection when, in fact, what we should really fear is customer indifference. A topic I’m inclined to get on my soapbox about!

In it’s most simplistic terms, there are two types of marketing…old school, traditional. It’s all about communications where we assume people are listening, we are comfortable telling the prospective customer, existing client, colleague, supplier how good we are. Commuication is all one way. Worst of all, your competitors are doing it too! And the practical examples of this; advertising in the local rag, glossy magazines, direct mail or dead tree media as it’s now called! Even basic websites are starting to fall into this category, where return on investment is disappearing quickly, if it ever existed at all?

The second is what I call conversational marketing, engaging with the market place, the customer. It’s about ideas generation, exploring future products and services together, provoking a positive, interactive reaction from customers whether old or new. Creating a marketing campaign that fires their imagination which in turn fires yours. Sounds far more vibrant, far more dynamic doesn’t it? Oh a little exciting too!

What do I mean by this? Well rather than allowing your customers indifference to your business being maintained, it’s about starting to think creatively about marketing campaigns that your customer finds appealing, where ideas not service are at the forefront. I’m talking about online marketing, viral marketing on the web, YouTube, a product/service with a true and I mean true differential advantage! Something where you revolutionise the customer experience in your industry! Or you package your offering in a new way like Radiohead did with their (only if your brand is well established) new album in late 2007, which allowed customers to chose what price they paid.

Radical stuff? Frightening? Uncomfortable? Expensive? Well, try this…imagine the way in which you have marketed in the past is denied to you. You can do anything with your previous budget. How would you engage in ‘marketing conversation’ with customers using non traditional marketing?

Blimey, further proof that marketing is radically changing. Just this week Google announced its latest advertising revenue figures that are set to overtake ITV’s, here in the UK, possibly within the next year - (www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology). Interesting times! Times that are giving opportunities for small businesses to engage with customers like never before. For me there are two types of opportunity, those that are missed and those that are taken! So why are small businesses still struggling to execute profitable marketing strategies?

I think there are a few harsh realities out there that we still haven’t got to grips with. As controversial as that might be here’s a few to get you started and stimulate debate:

We don’t think about marketing enough. I’ll explain. We go head long into a plan that usually takes the form of traditional marketing without planning or researching it thoroughly. Advertising, networking (the actually meeting people face to face variety) and direct mail are the most common. We spend lots of money and then wonder why it didn’t work. Plans that clearly state a return on investment for marketing activity are a must.

We develop marketing approaches that look like a weak universal appeal rather than niche focus and clearly communicating our offer! Even if our products are boring, it’s our job to make them exciting!

Lots of small businesses seem to think that they must sell price as the differentiating factor in their product/service offering. In fact, it’s about how you behave as a brand that’s now important. Brand is about trust (and so is the internet), the new business world is more about open and trusting relationships with customers and staff, which in itself means more transparency. Imagine that!

Marketing isn’t about telling people how good you are. The customers a lot more informed and sophisticated than that. We’ve gone beyond just communicating with customers and moved to having conversations with them. That’s about developing a dynamic relationship and above all getting them involved with what you are doing and developing.

Small businesses haven’t run out of ideas, they just struggle with executing them and don’t differentiate themselves enough! We all look too similar; the products are the same and we sell ‘quality’ too much. Creative marketing campaigns are too rare. Your market place will be typically crowded so it’s more important you stand out.

Traditional marketing has been dead for about 15 years. Some of us are slowly turning our back on the traditional advertising solution, however, many of us can’t see the wood for the trees or is it we’ve just lost sight of what’s in front of us? Those of us who run small businesses don’t have much choice nowadays. As a client of mine said recently “You have to grow really big or go niche.” Drifting along isn’t an option.

As Seth Godin www.sethgodin.co.uk (I like this guy a lot) says “Alternative approaches aren’t a novelty – they are all we’ve got left.”

The key question is what in your product/service portfolio is clearly different, unusual even curious in your market place? Do you provide it and if your answer isn’t convincing enough to you, you might have a problem.