Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

What is it that determines ones success in life? In business? Let’s take a look at how a simple lemonade stand can teach you the skills necessary to succeed.

Attitude

You’ve heard it before… Attitude is everything. Well, it certainly can’t hurt. Wouldn’t your rather be running a business with these fun lovers who know how to take a break and have some fun? Or, you can always work with me, the slave-driver

Seriously now, its best to take someone who is in a funk and move them off the front line until their attitude shifts. Or, just send them home. It’s not worth the loss in sales. Your customers’ lives are hectic enough. Wouldn’t you prefer to be around someone who is spreading liquid sunshine? So would your customers.

Teamwork

What a great opportunity to learn how to take turns, share and work together toward a common goal. I watched seven little girls divide up tasks themselves. Each found a way to contribute. One sat behind the lemonade pitcher and poured the lemonade in the cups. Another collected money. Another shouted into the microphone. One held the menu. One held the sign. One wrote on the sidewalk. Another served the cookies. And each provided assistance to the others. Wow, I couldn’t have orchestrated it if you paid me. What made it work? They all shared the same vision and a desire to have fun and make some money. It didn’t matter how they got there and who did what. They shared responsibilities. They kept moving forward to their goal.

What would your business be like if everyone worked like that? What would it take to get there? Can everyone on your team buy into the vision and strive for the goal?

Goal Setting

On Sunday my middle daughter took a break from the lemonade stand to play with a friend who stopped by. She was very disappointed that she wasn’t going to get any money for the time she was away. She immediately said “How much money do I need to make to go to Build-A-Bear Workshop?” When I told her she stayed focused all the rest of the day and never left the stand. Once she had achieved her financial goal (at about 6:30pm) she said “Okay, mom, I’m done. We can close up now”.

Without a goal, she never even would have sat at that lemonade stand. But her sisters were earning money to go to “Build-A-Bear” and heck if she was going to be left behind.

Give yourself something to shoot for. Give yourself a goal. Without a clear picture of where you want to go, you may never get there. but if you know that you want to go to Build-A-Bear tomorrow morning, you’ll walk all the way around the park until you find enough people to buy that lemonade.

I have a friend who excels at Network Marketing. I once asked him what is the key success factor for someone in your business. You know what he said? “Hunger. You’ve got to really want to succeed.” Do you have the hunger? What will it take for you to get it?

I once had the hunger and I achieved great things. Then I lost the hunger and I lost the things. I rediscovered the hunger in a new place. One that is sustainable. Is your hunger sustainable and can it be met while achieving a balanced life?

Life Balance

The second lesson my daughters learned from this is that if you don’t participate, you don’t share in the rewards. You need to contribute and do your share to share in the results. You need to do the activity. When my youngest daughter took a break to run in the sprinkler, she knew full well that she wasn’t going to get paid for the hour she played, and she was okay with that. She had already earned enough to go to “Build-A-Bear” and its was time to play.

As you can see from the video above, a quick run through the sprinkler is refreshes the attitude. Make sure you plan time for replenishing your soul. How can you take a “run through the sprinkler” today?

Activity

If you want to achieve your goals, you have to do the activity. You don’t necessarily have to “work” in terms of putting a lot of labor and pain with it. You can choose to have fun or to be cranky, but you do have to do the steps to sell the lemonade. You will have more fun and more success if you have a good attitude, but without staffing the stand, you won’t sell any lemonade.

My husband has this great quote that he taped to his computer. It says “If all you do is sit around and visualize, the men in white overalls will come and take away your furniture.” I know a lot of personal growth classes teach you just need to visualize, but its only part of the equation. You actually need to do activity to support you vision.

While activity gives you results, it’s activity with a positive attitude that gives you success.

Activity + Positive Attitude = Success!

Have you planned to balance your goals and activities with some attitude refreshing fun? Make room for that creative down time. It’s in those quiet moments that brilliance comes to you.

What are some of your favorite stories of those non-working moments when something brilliant comes to you?

What marketing expert should you be working with for each marketing tactic that you want to implement? This is a short list to help you figure out who you need to call. In a larger business, it is typically the brand or product manager that writes the marketing strategy and plan and then oversees all the specialized experts who make it happen.  Here is a brief list of who to work with…

• Marketing Communications: could be an AD agency or just a graphic artist, copywriter and web designer. The Ad agency would also have a creative director that oversees the other 3 specialists. They create your identity, logo, brochures, website, packaging, ads (both online and off) and most materials. Can also create email newsletters. A direct marketing specialist would also fall into this category.
• Web site: web designer works on the visual representation, web developer handles ecommerce, community forums and other functionality, SEO expert gets your chosen keywords emphasized,
• Social Media: blog/community manager oversees blog content and responds to community members (blogger could also be in a different dept. like PR). Twitter and forum communicator.
• PR: gets feature articles written, product placements, press tours, press kits, press releases, speaker placement, quotes,and more.
• Event Marketing: identifies, schedules and prioritizes marketing events, creates booths, demos, etc.
• Channel Marketing: work with resellers, OEM, Affiliate managers and Evangelists: who get 3^rd parties to sell your products or services or use them in their own products
• Business Development & Sales – works directly with key customer accounts to close a sale.

This is most of the major categories of specialists. The ones you need to work with can vary depending on your type of business.

What other marketing specialists have you used?

Marketing is like Exercise

The more you do it the better you get. You also need to be consistent at both in order to see the full effects. And the long-term effects are better than the short-term gain of a single effort.

Marketing isn’t just a one time thing. You can’t just send out a direct mail piece or one email and think you’ve done your marketing. Think Campaign. Or, think like you’re  training for a 5K race and then another and another.  You have to do it over and over and over again to see the cumulative benefits. You need a strategy that ensures that all efforts build upon previous efforts. You train, your race. You plan, you launch.

It takes training and practice to get good at exercise and it takes the same to get good at marketing.

I was an All-American swimmer in High School and college. I was an athlete most of my life. Then I had 3 kids in 2 years and formal exercise completely stopped. Yeah, I chased 3 toddlers and carried twins around in car seats and pushed 3 kids in a double stroller. But formal exercise ceased and I felt it.

After 5 years of non-fitness, I recently have been able to carve out time to start exercising again. But for the first time in my life, I approached it from a different perspective. I was sympathetic, understanding and patient (not one of my strong traits). I knew better than to push too hard in the beginning. I thought, anything I do is better than where I have been. So I started out slow. 20 minutes 3 days a week. Missed a week due to sickness, but gave myself permission to rest. Then, I got right back at it.

Well, 3 months later and I can actually complete the pre-set program on the treadmill. I’ve even picked up a hand weight or two. You see, I didn’t beat myself up when I got bad results (unusual for me). I didn’t beat myself up when I needed to rest (again, out of character). But, I just reminded myself that I would start up when it was right for me and complimented myself for taking such good care of myself.

This encouraged me to get back on that treadmill and get going again. And now I’m feeling the cumulative effects.

It’s just like that with your business and marketing. Sometimes you make mistakes. Sometimes campaigns don’t give you quite the right results. But you learn from them, you make adjustments and you try again. Give yourself permission to be imperfect. Give yourself credit for keeping at it.

It’s been like that with my business too. Everyday I work at it. I progress what seems like a breadcrumb in the overall plan. Each day I may not see significant results, but when I can look back and see how far I’ve come cumulative in the last 6 months, I can smile.

Have you exercised your marketing muscles today? Have you scheduled time to plan and practice your marketing?

How do I automate the marketing of my blog?

Do you automate the marketing of your blog posts? Here’s what I’ve done.

My blog posts are relevant to small business owners and entrepreneurs who want to market their business better. As such, I have them automatically posted to places that small business owners can find them such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and more. I have spent some time automating this process so I can focus on the creation of content and not the marketing of it. Here are the methods and tools I used to automate the updates of my blog posts.

Twitter

I have two twitter accounts; the first, @expertmktgcoach, I tweet each post once, and the second, @debzimmer, I use to repeat the tweets throughout the day.

I use Hootsuite to import the RSS feed from my blog to twitter. This sends out one tweet per account. With Hootsuite, I can also schedule tweets on that second account so that the tweet reoccurs throughout the day.

LinkedIn

My blog headline posts to my LinkedIn status using Hootsuite. Hootsuite also sends the status to Ping.fm which updates numerous other sites that I visit less often.

My blog is then imported into my LinkedIn Profile using the LinkedIn WordPress Application.

Facebook

I use Facebook Notes to import my RSS feed into my Facebook Page. This creates a duplicate copy of my blog on Facebook. I can also use Hootsuite to import the headlines into my wall on my personal Facebook profile or public page.

Social Bookmarking

Using the WordPress Plugin tool for OnlyWire, my posts are automatically bookmarked to numerous bookmarking sites with which I have accounts. It creates bookmarks at more bookmarking sites than I can reach through Ping.fm. Ping.fm reaches other social media sites that OnlyWire doesn’t, such as Plaxo.

RSS Reader

I use Feedburner for those who want to get my blog posts in an RSS reader format.

Kindle

If you are a Kindle user, you can read my blog by subscribing through the Amazon Kindle Store.

SEO

Each post I write is search engine optimized. I use a number of tools including WordPress plugins to assist me with search engine optimization.

Email

There’s one more automation tool I’m considering but haven’t yet implemented. I see that AWebber is now integrated with Feedburner and can send the RSS feeds in email to your subscriber base. I think that sounds way cool. I just wish the tools I currently use offered that service.

That’s all I’ve got on blog marketing automation. Do you have any tools or systems you use that you particularly like?