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Posts from the 'Fun With Marketing' Category
June 24th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
I’ve been listening to “Coach Deb,” aka Deborah Micek, in the second of a series of calls being hosted by Marketing Mentor Adam Urbanski on Social Media Networking. The third call, tomorrow, is about Facebook, and the fourth call, Thursday, is about creating an “Integrated Social Networking Strategy.” You can listen live to either or both of the last two calls, and get recordings/transcripts of all of them along with bonuses, at FromContactsToContracts.com.
Adam says that, with Twitter, he was able to make contacts and connections very rapidly - even with people after whom Adam had been chasing via phone and email without success. Deborah says that even if you aren’t ready to start using Twitter, grab your name on there without spaces and without underscores, either of which brands you as a latecomer or late adopter. Get your brand, company name, and products names, too!
Here’s a sample of the nuggets of information I gleaned from the call - some of this is paraphrased as best as I could catch it here while listening to the webcast:
Top 10 Reasons You Could/Should Be Using Twitter:
1. Enables you for quick, instant communication with your “tribe.” (You can even use a separate account to send messages to a private “tribe” to their cell phones.)
2. For brand recognition. You can tweet to other folks directly with the “@” sign attached to the beginning of your user name (without a space), and because you’re using a brand or company name as your user name…you get the idea.
3. Reputation management. If you don’t have a presence, you don’t know what people are saying about you, you can’t respond appropriately, and you can’t join the conversation.
4. Research and knowledge.
5. Trendspotting.
6. Being on the bleeding edge of what’s going on in the world (or your world).
7. Strengthen the bonds between friends, colleagues, and JV partners.
8. Attract new clients. (Not actively going after them - it’s more subtle than that.) And it’s purposely NOT the #1 reason you should be on Twitter.
9. To find and connect with influencers, and keep in touch.
10. SEO. It’s one of the top SEO options for online research. (Look at TweetScan.com for an example.)
Rules to Play By on Twitter:
1. Business is ALWAYS personal. Twitter gives you the ability to get personal with your audience. The watch words: Transparent and authentic.
2. Captivate, use influential language, and give people a reason to continue a conversation at your blog if you have more to say on a subject.
3. Have contests.
4. Think about (and ask about) what clients love about you, and let that shine through on Twitter.
5. Write as though you’re talking to one person.
6. Use a 1:8 ratio of tweets that are at all promotional, versus: Being a resource for people; talking to people and about people; sharing links, resources, and blog posts from other folks; connecting with people, etc.
7. Don’t send people to sales pages or landing pages - send them to your blog.
8. Every 10, 12, or 20 tweets, ask your followers a question.
9. Attract and connect on Twitter - convert on your own site/blog.
10. Give people the opportunity to be a resource to you - people naturally want to be helpful and valuable, and you don’t have to know everything.
Hope this is useful to you! Again, check out FromContactsToContracts.com to get more detailed, real-time access. And check out Deborah and Adam on Twitter as well.
Posted in Dances With Gurus, Fun With Marketing | 1 Comment »
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June 13th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
 Skyline Exhibits is one of the biggest providers of trade show booths, from pop-up styles to full-blown installations. And as a lead generation strategy, they’ve taken it upon themselves to help educate their target audience on how to get the most out of their trade show investment.
Isn’t that smart? An appearance at a trade show can be quite expensive - one client of ours spent close to $100,000 last year, for booth space and all the expenses that go along with it. And they rented a booth (not from Skyline) for about $15K, not including the production of the graphics for it.
If you’re gonna make that kind of investment, you’d better feel good about it. That’s what Skyline’s trying to do, by offering free seminars for people responsible for making trade show appearances count.
As of this writing, they’re currently promoting seminars in 26 states (including l’il ol’ New Hampshire!), plus a few in Canada and one in Australia. I went to the “Successful Trade Show Marketing Strategies” session yesterday with Katie Oddy, Karina Giordano, and Debbie Carbone from Acorn Creative (and had a very happy meeting with someone to whom I’d only spoken with over the phone while she was a client last year, Cynthia Mailhot of G.M. Roth).
In a two-hours-plus presentation, we did get a sales pitch of sorts, but it was about as light as you could expect - a slide show of different booth designs they’ve done, which lasted about 15 minutes. With the rest of the time, presenter Frank Leggio from Skyline North answered a bunch of audience questions, gave us a good overview of trade show marketing, and sent us home with multiple booklets of information, forms, checklists, and more good stuff.
This is Dignity Marketing™ in action. Skyline has a ton of experience with trade shows, and instead of making an outright sales pitch for their booths, graphics, and consulting services, they offer free information of tremendous value to their potential customers. (Customers who, as a result, don’t mind at all when Skyline shows a little slide show in exchange for the value Skyline delivered.)
Of course, Skyline’s big enough that they can offer sessions like these dozens of times all over the country. For lifestyle entrepreneurs, this may not be so easy. But you can probably do something similar, on a local scale. for example, another client of ours, ClosetPlace, invited a professional organizer to give a workshop in their showroom. Pretty neat-o, I’d say.
Give it some thought, and see what kind of educational opportunity you could offer!
Posted in Fun With Marketing | No Comments »
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March 18th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
“How does Twitter make money?”
This is what Lani asked aloud the other day, and for now the answer seems to be, “With venture capital funding.” So on a lark, we Googled “Twitter business model” and found this post from Allen Stern wondering the same thing, but a few months earlier. I can’t seem to find his answer, but I did find a different post from Jason Calacanis, with 3 ways Twitter could become a billion-dollar business.
(Good grief! Riding a 140-character microblogging engine to a billion dollars? Maybe Twitter’s worth paying attention to after all.)
That said, I noticed two of Calacanis’ three options were based in the old school “Interruption Marketing” world. If you’re not familiar with the term, here it is, contrasted with “Permission Marketing,” from the Wikipedia entry on Seth Godin:
Advertisements on TV and Radio are classified as ‘interruption marketing’, which interrupt the customer while he is doing something of his preference. Thus he introduced the concept of ‘permission marketing’ where the business provides something of value to the customer and thus obtains his permission and then does marketing.
And since Seth Godin wrote the book on Permission Marketing, he oughta know!
With that said, if you were reading the “tweets” of the people you follow, and were suddenly presented with an ad every so often, that looked just like a regular tweet, would you be happy about that? Or annoyed?
That’s the scenario in two of the three business models Calacanis proposed. Granted, I didn’t start a blog empire and sell it to AOL like he did, so maybe I’m not the best guy to ask, but it seems to me that Interruption Marketing just isn’t right for Web 2.0 places like Twitter.
Though I was late to the discussion (his initial post was back in January), I added comment #37 to Calacanis’ post with some other potential money-making, non-interruption-marketing-based ideas. That’s just one of the many great things about blogging - no matter when the conversation started, you can join in.
And I’m just a guy sitting at the kitchen table, with his socks still wet from having stepped through a snowbank to give his wife her laptop, as she was heading out the door to drop our son’s play pal back at his house, on the way to a MicroCredit-NH peer group meeting. (Whew! That’s a mouthful if you read it aloud.)
But I’m also a guy with a half-decent opinion, which is now sitting out on the blog of a heavy-hitting, influential guy who’s being read by a lot of other very interesting folks. Which is pretty cool.
I guess there will always be a place for interruption marketing - it still gets a response, and even if it’s much, much less than it was, if it can be quantifed, it can be sold. But I think when we look back, we’ll see that Permission Marketing may have knocked Interruption Marketing for a loop, but Web 2.0 put it down for the count as we know it.
Posted in Dances With Gurus, Fun With Marketing | No Comments »
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March 13th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
At yesterday’s 2008 MicroCredit-NH Entrepreneurial Exchange, Lani and I had the pleasure of helping our friend and ally Kevin Skarritt out with his general session presentation on cutting-edge marketing and PR.
To illustrate how marketing has changed over time, Kevin put together a 34-foot-long foamcore board depicting the major technology events of the last 450 or so years…and showed how 90% of the changes in technology which affecting the way marketing is done has happened in just the last five years.
Of course, foamcore is only so compelling. So Kevin also wrote a few scripts for us to perform together, using a dating theme to show certain milestones in the evolution of marketing.
The one below was shot by Katie Payne of The Measurement Standard, and aside from noting that this is an example of the advent of infomercial style, I just have to let the video speak for itself. 
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March 11th, 2008 by Lani Voivod
I just read Steve Martin’s memoir about his early years forging ahead into the entertainment business, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life. It’s an unpretentious, honest, and insightful romp into the heart of storytelling, the naivete of youth, and the inescapable truth that success takes patience, perseverence, and roll-up-your-sleeves WORK.
One of Martin’s experiences in particular struck me as a great metaphor for MARKETING and BRANDING.
You remember The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, right? Remember how an appearance on Carson was often the make-or-break litmus test for anyone trying to make it in show biz - especially comedians? Martin shares what the reality of his first “Big Break” revealed:
There was a belief that one appearance on The Tonight Show made you a star. But here are the facts. The first time you do the show, nothing. The second time you do the show, nothing. The sixth time you do the show, someone might come up to you and say, “Hi, I think we met at Harry’s Christmas party.” The tenth time you do the show, you could conceivably be remembered as being seen somewhere on television. The twelfth time you do the show, you might hear, “Oh, I know you. You’re that guy.”
Martin’s first appearance on The Tonight Show was in October of 1972. After a few appearances, he experimented with a schtick that got him “demoted” to appearing with guests hosts instead of Johnny himself. Still, Martin showed up whenever he was invited, and kept working on his material, doing his best, and sharing his style. After proving himself, he was re-invited to a Carson-hosted episode (on which Sammy Davis Jr. was also booked), and he finally got his Big Break. The camera panned over to Carson doubled over in laughter during Martin’s routine, and thus a Comedic Star was endorsed to millions of TV viewers.
This happened on Martin’s 16th (!!!) Tonight Show appearance, in September of 1974.
Martin started dabbling in magic and entertainment as an employee of Disneyland in the summer of 1955. That means it took 17 years just to play and dabble and fail and put things OUT THERE before he made it to the Tonight Show stage for the first time.
THEN it took TWO MORE YEARS of: Working things out in clubs, in his head, and on paper; sharing, honing, and experimenting with content to all types of audiences; saying “Yes!” to opportunities at inopportune times; trusting the process; not getting all down and gloomy when “results” weren’t showing up as quickly as he thought they should have, etc., before Martin’s work really paid off, in his own estimation.
Doesn’t this sound like the small biz owners’ experiences with marketing? We want our one-shot efforts to PRODUCE RESULTS, darnit! We want to know our time, energy, and money aren’t wasted, that we’re investing in the right things to make our businesses successful.
But like all good things in life, building your Content Kingdom, your Brand, and your relationship with your Ideal Audience TAKES TIME.
Wanna know the funniest thing, though? After his killer appearance in 1974, what Martin himself said was “…the first one I could really call a smash,” he had an encounter with a woman in an antique store the very next day. She asked him if he was the boy who was on The Tonight Show the night before. When Martin said yes, she blurted, “Yuck!”
It just goes to show that even when you’ve done your job to the best of your ability, even when you’ve put as much of your message, mission, and vision OUT THERE for your Ideal Audience to consume in as many ways as you can with the time and resources you have on hand, you’re still not right for everyone.
Guess what? You’re not supposed to be! Martin himself ended up being one of the most successful, commercial, influential comic talents of all time, going on to write books and screen plays, star in movies, and win prestigious awards like Emmys and Grammys and such. Turns out the opinion of that chick in the antique store didn’t really thwart his own ascent too too much.
So while you’re thinking about new ways to have fun connecting and communicating with your own Ideal Audience, enjoy a clip of one of Steve Martin’s appearances on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson, below. :)
Posted in Brand Funk, Fun With Marketing, Mood Boosters | 1 Comment »
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January 4th, 2008 by Lani Voivod
Article marketing is one of the three Power Tools — in addition to blogging and news/press releases — we recommend to small business owners on a tight marketing budget because it’s affordable, effective, easy. (Heck, we recommend it for bigger companies, too, since adding informative, relevant content around your field or industry to the online party is a MUST to your searchablility, visibility, and competitive edge.)
 Last week I read a kick-butt blog post from Acorn Creative’s “Chief Nut” Kevin Skarritt and asked him if we could send it out to the world via our preferred article distribution service, www.AhaArticles.com. Being the kind ‘n generous dude he is, he said yes. And yesterday, we were notified by www.EzineArticles.com, one of the most SEO-friendly and popular article libraries, that they liked the article, too.
They sent us the email below. The reason I’m pasting it is because, well, even if this is their standard method of operation, it’s a winning strategy because it makes me feel GOOD. Check it out:
Hello Lani And Allen,
Your article, “Inbound Link Mania - 10 Key Content Strategies to Increase Online Visibility” - has been accepted and added to the EzineArticles.com
directory:
http://EzineArticles.com/?id=902941
You’ve also earned Expert Author status:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lani_Voivod
Your article will be on our high-traffic home page later today:
http://EzineArticles.com/
Your article has also been sent to our exclusive EzineArticles RSS Feed and to our proprietary EzineArticles Email Alert Members.
You are welcome to add one of these special buttons on your website to show that your articles have been featured on
EzineArticles.com: http://EzineArticles.com/XXXXXXX [Not the real link, since I don't think it's public]
For quality control purposes, your article was reviewed by our Associate Editor #40
To Your Article Marketing Success!
http://EzineArticles.com/
 In the realm of small biz marketing, how often do you get to FEEL like something you put “out there” actually made a difference? How often do you get to FEEL like your marketing efforts aren’t in vain? How often do the tools you use actually pat you on the back and let you brag to the world that you’re a recognized EXPERT in the article-writing community?
Of course, this is a GREAT move for EzineArticles.com, too, because they get free marketing. But isn’t that what it’s all about? YOU focus on delivering products, services, and creating a brand with stellar standards and practices that make your ideal audience FEEL SOOOOO GOOD, they willingly and happily brag about you to others in their world?
So, in 2008 and beyond, go ahead — find little things you can do to make every contact with you and your business, your BRAND, as fun, entertaining, and pleasurable as possible. Take an extra 10 minutes to add personal touches to your marketing touches. Whether it’s your outgoing phone messages, your invoices, your signage, etc., take some chances and make your mark.
It’s not only fun, it spreads good stuff in the world…and it’s GOOD for your bottom line.
Posted in Agents of Karma, Fun With Marketing | No Comments »
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December 31st, 2007 by Allen Voivod
The last day of 2007. The day before a whole year of possibilities! Did you spend December planning out your marketing? Or is that your first order of business come January 2nd?
Well, I know some folks hate, loathe, and despise doing marketing plans, so let me suggest a very easy one (just 3 steps!), inspired by my lovely wife and business partner.
In looking back over the year, Lani discovered that we:
Wrote 15 articles…
Sent out seven press releases…
Recorded 10 ADD Info Summits…
Landed 10 speaking engagements…
Attended five high-profile business events…
Created six information products…
And wrote this, our 100th blog post of the year!
We asked ourselves if, had written these out verbatim at the beginning of 2007 as our goals for the year, would we have believed we could pull this whole shebang off? The answer, in all honesty, was a resounding “No way!”
Which leads me to the easy 3-step marketing planning thing:
Step 1: List everything you did for marketing last year.
Step 2: It’s likely that 20% of those activities brought in 80% of your revenue last year. Which activities are they? List the top 3-5 that gave you the best return on investment.
Step 3: Do more of (and spend more on) those biggest-bang-for-the-buck activities next year than you did last year.
At the risk of bogging you down in more percentages, here’s a good guideline from Greg Stuart, co-author of What Sticks. Initially given as advice for allocating advertising dollars, the concept works just as well for the broader marketing picture:
Spend 70% of your marketing money on what’s already working; spend 20% tweaking things that you like but aren’t performing as well as you’d hoped; and spend the last 10% trying something entirely new.
I’m calling this the Monday Morning Marketing Plan because it’s like the concept of Monday-morning quarterbacking - analyzing and making judgments on the basis of hindsight. As marketing plans go, it doesn’t get much simpler. Do more of what worked, and less of what didn’t.
Now on behalf of Lani and myself, we wish you a wonderful, joyous, and prosperous New Year!
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November 16th, 2007 by Allen Voivod
 It’s a blustery Friday here in central New Hampshire, and we had the first big snow flurries outside our window this morning! Perfect for cuddling up by a warm baseboard heater and attending a marketing webinar.
Marketing Strategy, Budgeting, and Planning for 2008 was the topic, and it comes at the perfect time, since we’re gearing up for not only our own planning, but for our clients as well. (The registration link is here as of 11/16/07, for more info.) Leading the charge was Mike Schultz, Publisher of RainToday.com and President of the Wellesley Hills Group, a leading firm focused on marketing, sales, and overall revenue growth for professional services businesses.
(Full disclosure: Jae-ann Rock, Principal at SunStream Consulting, is a great friend of ours who’s worked with and has nothing but good things to say about the Wellesley Hills Group - and this webinar reinforced her word-of-mouth.)
One of the things I really appreciated out of the event was the style of content delivery - warm, breezy, and leavened with a generous helping of humor. A marketing mistake illustrated by an outake from Monty Python and the Holy Grail was the comedic highlight for me - about 1:18 into the clip below is the analogy of the wrong group of folks to be making marketing decisions:
And it also touched very directly on the concept of integrated marketing I’ve mentioned in a couple of my last blog posts. For example, they referenced a study where buyers rated seeing an in-person presentation as much more effective at getting them to buy something than, say, a telemarketing call.
But if you think that means telemarketing is a dead end, you’d be wrong. Telemarketing may not get people to buy, but it got people to go to the presentation … where they were much more likely to buy.
The point being, it’s not enough to understand how different marketing tactics work - you have to know how they work together. Sometimes it’s linear, where one thing leads to another, and sometimes it’s web-like, where one thing can lead in multiple directions, but the truth remains that you’ve gotta get to your audience regularly, in as many ways as you can handle, and track the results so you know what’s working.
What’s fun for you, and serves your audience at the same time? What brings new leads into your business most effectively, and what tactics best develop those leads into bonafide clients?
Answer those questions, and you set the foundation developing a solid marketing plan. Without those answers, you could be setting yourself up for failure - or for a success you don’t understand and can’t replicate.
(And to see some of the strategic marketing questions you should be asking yourself, check out Mike’s blog post on the subject.)
Posted in Fun With Marketing | 1 Comment »
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November 12th, 2007 by Allen Voivod
It’s a term we hear more and more (and use more and more), and you can kind of figure it out just by using the meanings of the words themselves. It’s something to do with tying together all the ways you promote your business, right?
Yes, but…
What, exactly, does the “tying together” entail?
And if you Google “integrated marketing,” you get all sorts of results. Some match, some overlap, and still others talk about entirely different things from the first results you see.
So what does it mean to integrate your marketing? Well, at the highest level, it’s all about consistency. Whether it’s for a single product campaign (short term) or your overall marketing strategy (long term), to integrate means to maintain the same voice, tone, and style in every place your audience could find you - design-wise, and content-wise.
The next level down is the planning. In a campaign, you want to plan to reach your audience as many ways as possible within a tight timeframe. Movies are a great example of this, because the studios have to get you to go to the movie within a week or two of it coming out, for them to have a shot at making a profit.
The long term type of planning involves Content Strategy and Dignity Marketing™. It’s creating a plan to consistently educate, inform, and entertain your audience so that, when they’re ready to buy, you’ve been at the top of their mind all along while they were considering their options, building a relationship instead of just selling, selling, selling.
And then it’s the connection. No marketing element should operate in isolation anymore. No one on earth buys what you have to sell based on one marketing touch. Instead, you connect one marketing touch with another - and gives your audience a low-risk reason to make the connection.
A direct mail piece that directs the reader to a website for a free download. An article that directs readers to a free ezine with more useful tips, tricks, and strategies. A networking event, where you exchange business cards for a CD of one of your introductory audio class recordings.
Get the idea?
And in the online world, your website is at the center of this integration. Everything you put out into the world should drive people to your website where, once they share contact information in exchange for something you offer, you can build relationships that meet their needs - and build a business for yourself, whether you’re brick ‘n mortar, ecommerce, or both.
Okay, I’m getting off the soapbox for now.
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