I’d popped in once before because I was intrigued by its location and I suspected that it probably wasn’t doing too well. The first time I’d called I’d tried on several very nice suits and almost bought one. And during the fitting the owners and I had got into a discussion about business. Like you do!

It was clear that they weren’t making much money from it. And I suggested doing a deal where they outfit me with their best and I’d help them with their marketing. I gave them a card and walked out and promptly forgot all about it.

Today when I went back (probably 8 months later) I noticed that they were closing down and having a closing down sale. I talked to one of the owners and he admitted that they were probably making enough to pay the rent, but that was it.

When I again suggested marketing he shrugged and said he’d love to but it costs money.

And of course he’s right to a certain extent…

Marketing needn’t cost the earth. What he hadn’t thought about was that he could have used my services for a ridiculously low price as their costs for suiting and booting me would have been minimal compared to the marketing education and implementation assistance they would have got.

And if they’d wanted to sell they could have then have sold a going concern.

There are so many things they could have done when I talked to them last time.  They could have …

• Worked out an interesting (true) story about the shop that differentiated it from competitors, to tell to everyone
• Started collecting names, emails and mobile numbers of people popping in (like me)
• Collected customers details
• started continually following up that list with offers and news
• re-launched the shop for minimal amounts of cash
• they could have got some PR going
• special invite only nights
• business networking!

The marketing world was their oyster. And yet they simply sat in the shop and looked at the top quality stock they have and wondered why it didn’t walk out the door.

They had well and truly buried their head in the sand and thought sales would come to them. And as a result their shop is going.

It’s such a shame when they’re both lovely people, but lack of sales happens to everyone, even those who really deserve the sales. If they don’t do their marketing right.

And yet that isn’t obvious to an ambitious, or desperate, business owner.

Many times a business owner wants to have a quick hit that boosts sales now. Like a punch drunk boxer they’ll grab hold of anything that seems to promise to support their sales and give them a breather.

Using Yellow Pages

A business advertises on Yellow Pages because:

1. Everyone else in their market sector does
2. The salesman was very persuasive
3. They just felt “they should”

And often when it comes to renew the advert they will. And yet their advert is usually pretty much like most other advertisers in their section of the directory.

They become just a “me too” and then have to fight on price with all those other advertisers.

Running Pay Per Click Campaigns

PPC, or pay per click, campaigns are highly effective at driving traffic to a web site.

However, if no thought has gone into what the business does with the arriving traffic the vast bulk of the traffic is likely to be wasted because only 3% of people are buying now, this minute.

If they’re starting a new campaign their traffic immediately goes up (assuming correctly targeted keywords) and so do their sales. And the business owner never realises that their sales could have been much more than they’re getting for that pay per click cost.

Advertising in Their Markets Trade Press

Some companies who are thinking about their market may choose to advertise in their trade press magazines.

There tends to be 2 problems here:

1. businesses don’t stick with an advertising campaign
2. Adverts don’t have any call to action

The results are that few people respond to the one-off adverts that appear or even to those adverts that are part of a campaign if they’re not asking the reader to do something.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is often seen as a black art and businesses tend to shy away from it and outsource to specialist companies to do their SEO for them.

The problem here is that like Pay Per Click (PPC) if you don’t know what you want to do with the traffic you get it will simply click away to another site. And even if you do know what you want to sell them what do you do with the ones that aren’t buying now?

The other point is that if you’re not different in some way from your competition like a Yellow Pages listing you can become involved in a beauty competition that you’re not even aware of and lose the potential business to a competitor with a “better” web site.

Strategy Wins Every Time

The reason many people don’t use strategy is that unless they do use it they simply don’t realise just how many potential clients they lose by using a tactical approach.

I’ve listed some well known different tactics of getting business above.

If the businesses had worked out before hand things like:

1. how to handle non buying prospects
2. how to ensure they captured more of the Yellow Page eyeballs
3. made sure their site stood out and ensured that people signed up for more

The business would have got more sales. More sales they wouldn’t have had to chase. More sales means business becomes less about chasing any sale and more about chasing the right sale for your business.

That’s a more profitable and strategic position to be in.

Interesting…

Internet marketing has radically changed the way we all do business. Social media is one component of that. It’s the newest and it too has the ability to change the way you do business.

And it’s not by joining Facebook or hanging around on Twitter. Just doing that wont give you value in terms of sales, more sales and, much though I hate the word, Branding!

You need to know what to do. What’s the point in having to make the mistakes that us early adopters did. Yes I’ve got over 6,000 followers on Twitter.

So what? It doesn’t matter a hoot if they don’t make money for your business.

So think about this…

Have you a strategy to include and integrate social media into what you’re doing? Because if you remember it was only a few years ago that people were saying you didn’t really need a website.

And now you’ve got people making a very decent living from a business that sells purely through a web site. I’ve several clients who do exactly that. Can I improve what they do.

You bet!

Often people just don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what others have successfully tried either.

Even if they’ve been on internet marketing courses, or “how to do SEO” courses!

I conducted a social media course this month and this company has Facebook, a blog and are on Twitter. They were amazed when I showed them one very common technique that changed the way they looked at some of the Internet marketing side of their company.

So if that training can cause such a change in outlook why is there no funding to help business do it?

And by the way this isn’t a particularly small company. They’ve got real passion behind their business and want to do it well. But it’s still a case of you don’t know what you don’t know.

Do you know what you don’t know?

So, what does your business card do for the person you presented it to?

It should tell them your name, your company, your role, your contact details and better business cards deliver further marketing for you, the owner of the business card.

Your Name On Your Business Card

Your name needs to be printed. Not hastily scrawled on. Not even printed on through a business card print program. Anything that smacks of cheap instantly downgraded your value in the eye of the receiver. After all which business is unable to afford to buy business cards for the staff who mix with other businesses? And obviously the answer is, "those that are about to go bust, or cut corners!"

Lack Of Contact Details

Conventional business cards tend to carry landline number, mobile number, less often fax number, company address, web site and email.

If any of these expected details are missing that business card is shouting out that the owner is a one man fly by night operator who wont be around and be available if the going gets tough or they don’t deliver on their promises.

Business Card Phone Numbers

I’ve come across a number of cards that still only have a mobile number on. That tells me you’re running your business from the kitchen table. Nothing wrong with using the kitchen table. However no landline makes me less likely to choose you over someone else who appears to be setup with a landline too. It tends to indicate that they intend being around for a while.

Using The Wrong Email Address

  Email addresses that aren’t the same domain name as your web site or blog tend to make people question whether you intend keeping going. Also using Google mail/Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail whilst very convenient shouts out that you’re not a "proper" business and again raises the question as to whether you’ll still be there tomorrow.

Badly Designed Web Sites or Parked Domains

If your contact sits down with your business card to check your site out will they see a well designed site? Or will they see a home-made mishmash or possibly worse a domain that is parked?

When your site is on your cards you need to be confident that it continues to support your message when you’re not around.

I speak from personal experience as I put up a site when I first started in business (about 5 years ago) meaning to get it designed better later and then within 3 months moved to using my blog as my site. However, I didn’t redirect my site to my blog. That meant that as time went on my hastily created site became more and more old-fashioned and out of step with my own business. And in fact cost me business.

No Business Address Speaks Volumes

It tells your contact that you don’t have business premises. If you’re selling products that might need to be returned that is a massive blow to your contacts confidence in you. If you’ve missed the address off as you work from home realise that few people are going to call round on the off-chance of seeing you.

I have an office in my house and I’ve never had anyone drop by unannounced. Just as well as my insurance doesn’t cover business visitors! Instead we go to a nearby hotel which has lovely on-tap coffee all the time, plus WIFI.

Social Media Marketing or social marketing

Social marketing also covers blogging, which only really started in December 1997 and started to take off much later around 2003/2004. Similarly Twitter started in March 2006 and continues to gain followers.

Social marketing experts tend to be people who are self-taught and usually have an Internet marketing and geeky background – guilty on all counts!

Why use social marketing at all?

Firstly, there are some companies that don’t even need it.

However, for the vast majority social marketing is a very worthwhile experiment. Be careful though as it does have a time cost and if you’re not careful you can lose your way.

So the most important thing to recognise about social marketing is that it must be integrated into your overall marketing strategy.

Using such an approach means that you can combine your use of social marketing with advertising, customer relationship building, customer service, sales, pr, telesales – you name it!

So social marketing can increase the number of times you interact with your prospects and customers. It can also increase your speed of response, which can defuse critical customer service problems more rapidly.

Your first forays into social marketing should be viewed as experimental and changeable as you need to find what works for your company.

Social Marketing Working For You

It’s easy to get started with social marketing. But it’s important that you work out your goals first.

Do you want to position your company as one of the experts in your field? Maybe you want to be seen as a thought leader? Perhaps all you want are leads or to handle customer service?

Whatever your goals are, they should be written down and agreed before anything else happens.

Then  look at your customers and prospects. What social tools do they use? Which ones could you encourage them to use to talk with you?

Then look at the social media you want to use. Find the appropriate tools that make lighter work of social media. For example there are offline blogging clients that make blogging easy. Or Twitter clients that make customer service a snip.

Above all, don’t be afraid to find some help on social marketing. Some of us have been through the learning curve and can help evolve a social marketing strategy and advise on tools to assist you.

The important thing is not to re-invent the wheel and to make a decision about whether social marketing is right for you right now.

However, the unexpected amounts of snow meant that it was totally impossible.

I was looking forward to helping people decide whether Social Media Marketing was right for their business. And then if it was showing them strategies to use to make the most of it, whilst not taking all their time.

Why Use Social Media Marketing?

Firstly most businesses already use one form of social media marketing, also known as business networking. Where you go to meetings to talk with other people.

The reason you should test whether social media marketing is right for you is because it’s become another marketing channel and people may expect you to use it.

The Problem With Social Media Marketing

There are so many different ways to get involved with social networking. As I’ve said before, just some of those ways include:

1. LinkedIn
2. Blogging
3. Squidoo
4. Hubpages
5. Digg
6. Facebook
7. Reddit
8. Stumbleupon
9. YouTube

And on, and on…

So how do you decide what to do, when to do it or even how to do it?

Funnily enough my audience would have discovered exactly that!

The What, When And How Of Social Media Marketing

The first thing to is to decide what you want this type of marketing to achieve. That’s part of the what. Remember it’s internet based but can be used in every other marketing channel you have too.

The next ‘what’ is decide what you want to say, and who you’re going to say it to to meet your goal(s).

And the final part of the ‘what’ is to decide which tools can communicate your message most effectively.

There’s much more to it than that but for the moment let’s go on to ‘When’. The question that arises is when should we do this type of marketing. The simple answer to that is when you have something to communicate with your chosen audience.

Notice that I’ve been saying “with your chosen audience” and not “to your chosen audience” and the reason is that your audience is in a conversation with you. And they have the ability to simply stop the conversation dead.

If you simply broadcast stuff to them all the time it’s not a conversation.

Lastly we come to ‘How’ to communicate with them. This comes down to having a social media policy, choosing who will use social media on behalf of the company (ideally all of your employees) and then working out the most effective times to do it and the expected amount of time people should invest in working with social media.

Obviously the solution is to sound them out during the lead up to the festive season.

What Are Good Business Gifts?

Obviously good corporate Christmas gifts depend on your budget. If you’re going to give a gift make sure that it is relevant to your customer and not just a bit of promotional material that you’ve got lying around like a company mousemat or mug.

By all means get a bit of corporate branding onto the gift, just make sure the result is something you would use!

So good corporate Christmas gifts are

• personal
• relevant to the relationship
• inexpensive

And above all they’re not tacky!

What About Last Minute Corporate Gifts?

You may have planned your corporate Christmas presents well in advance and then suddenly get an influx of new customers who you’d like to give a gift to.

What do you do?

Firstly, if you want to be remembered, step away from the corporate diary, calendar, mug and mouse mat.

Secondly, you should already have compiled a list of possible standby Christmas presents when you planned your original corporate Christmas gifts. These may not have your branding but you believe would be equally welcome.

Items that can go down well include wine, hampers, business books and tickets to events. It all depends on the budget you set yourself for each client.

I’ve already reviewed a number of books I recommend for corporate gifts and my next post talks about the top 10 business books that you really must read and/or get as gifts.

How Much To Spend on Corporate Gifts?

I understand that food, drink, gift tokens or tobacco (semi-permanent goods) cannot be used as tax-allowable expenses. In addition the gift must not be more than £50 to the same person in a year. Click here for more UK Christmas Tax Tips

OF course the other minefields to be aware of are that you may offend people you miss out with the gift giving or be regarded as buying the business with bribes.

The important point is that this appears to be a radical behind the scenes overhaul of the Google search engine. That means if there is a change to the way sites and phrases are indexed it’s likely that your rating is going to change. Either in a good way or in a bad way…

And it all depends on whether you had the foresight, or luck,  to use SEO methods that still allows you to rank well in Google.

What’s Google Changed?

Several people have pointed to some changes in the results and concluded that:

1) There appears to be an increase in the weight given to the domain name
2) Similarly increased weight to tags in Technorati and other key sites
3) Maybe a slight lessening of the important of video

And I suspect there’s also an increase in the importance of Twitter data to compound the issue further.

Comparing The ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Google

I discovered an enterprising SEO person had created a tool to compare the results between “Old Google” and this “New Google.”

When I tried the Google Compare Tool out on my own name: “Jim Symcox” I discovered the newer Google found 24,10 results compared to 6,810 for the older one.

So something has definitely happened…

And if you read the forums and articles on the web there are quite a few SEO specialists who are worried that they will lose the ability to manipulate the search results for their client sites because the key domains will simply be bought out by big business. After all if you’re a one man band and you’re offered 100,000 for a domain you’re hardly likely to say no, are you?

What Happens To The SEO Experts?

That means the big players will dominate the Google top positions and that leaves SEO experts unable to make much of a dent for their clients.

You can see why they’d be worried. I mean would you employ someone who gets no appreciable results for you?

So the SEO expert may be facing extinction, however that leaves the humble web site owner without any real ammunition against the bigger players. It could be an interesting few months as Google rolls this out across all its data centres.

Of course it might mean that we need to employ different methods for improving search positions, or even use only the current “white hat” ones.

Good luck to you! Personally, I hope that Business Growth Powerpack manages to cling on to it’s positions in Google. Time will tell!

Yes, it’s a way of developing a conversation, yes it’s a way of improving rapport and yes it’s possible to display your expertise.

However, without making sales, or promoting sales the whole exercise with social media is pointless and a complete waste of time.

Remember business lives and dies by the profits it makes. Not because profit is bad but simply because a business needs profit to invest and grow.

There are 5 simple steps you can take to ensure you get your social media marketing efforts working for you. And I’ll come to those shortly.

Social Media Can Easily Waste Your Time

I’ve now officially lost count of all the people who claim to be social media experts. Just like I’ve lost count of all those that claim to be marketing gurus.

And that’s because there are now so many facets to social media, for example:

1. The Twitter Phenomena
2. Blogging, still going despite attempts to stifle or kill it
3. Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit still keeping people up to date with good sites and news
4. All the blogging sites in all their various blog forms, like lenses, hubs and the like
5. Forums
6. Article directories
7. Business networking sites like LinkedIn and Ecademy
8. Mixed personal and business networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo
9. Second Life

And on, and on and so many different ways to take advantage of it all

You really could spend all day, every day “doing” social media.

The 5 Simple Steps To Win At Social Media Marketing

So how do decide what to do?

Social Media Marketing Step 1: Realise that if you’re in your own business and you’re unlikely to have the time to experiment with or understand all that is available in the social media arena.

Social Media Marketing Step 2: Understand that it’s better to ask for some training to give you an overview of what can be done.

Social Media Marketing Step 3: Once you’ve got an appreciation set-up a social media strategy that delivers the experiences you want your clients and prospects to get from your business and which lead to more sales!

Social Media Marketing Step 4: Work out a set of social marketing tactics that can deliver the strategy.

Social Media Marketing Step 5: Ensure you get value for money from each tactic employed by constantly measuring results. If you get little or no results tweak until you do or until you see that it’s obvious that particular social media tactic wont work for your business.

Creative Credits aims to help Manchester SME businesses get creative input from other businesses registered on the Creative Credits gallery on their web site.

The way it works is as follows:

Creative Credits As A User

Initially eligible users register on the Creative Credits site. There is a deadline after which no more companies can register.

Then there is a lottery and a certain number of companies is awarded “Creative Credits.” What that means is that NESTA (the organisation funding this) will pay £4,000 of a £5,000 creative bill if the user uses one of the companies registered on the creative credits database.

What NESTA say on their web site is:

We’re inviting Manchester-based small businesses from all sectors to apply for ‘Creative Credits’ worth £4,000. These can be used to purchase services from a local creative firm. All we ask is an investment of at least £1,000 and we’ll top it up with £4,000.

The first wave of registrations has finished and the next wave will be February 2010. So remember to register.

Creative Credits As A Supplier

A web design agency, marketing coach, PR company, graphic designer or other sort of creative company registers on the Creative Credits site as a supplier of those services.

Then they wait to be approached by businesses who can browse the online gallery to choose a supplier to work with.

It does seem like a very good idea for businesses who would benefit from creative input but who really can’t justify the cost of a campaign yet.

And of course I’m registered as a supplier, see my creative credits gallery