The Best Gift Idea for Entrepreneurs: An Introduction

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‘Tis the season to be jolly…and to give gifts.  I recently read an article that was posted on LinkedIn by Adam Grant about the gift of giving an introduction.  In the article he wrote about the value giving someone an introduction can bring and the relatively low cost of doing so.  He also chronicled introductions given by people that lead to the evolution of some of the biggest brands to date.  For example, after an introduction by a friend, Steve Wozniack met Steve Jobs and Apple was born.  A classmate named Paul McCartney was introduced to John Lennon and, well you know how that story ended, with the Beatles.

I agree with what he said that giving an introduction as a gift is very often overlooked.  I am a big proponent of helping others and connecting people that might of service to each other.  Sometimes I have client’s that I think could use or benefit from each other in some way and I introduce them.  Recently, I was pitched by a freelance copywriter about using their services.  Not only did I feel that I had a use for them with some of my projects, I also thought of a client that could use them as well.  I introduced them and he ended up doing some work for both of us.

This holiday season, I am going to make a point of giving the gift of an introduction to as many people as I can and I encourage my fellow entrepreneurs and small business owners to do the same.  Who knows, maybe an introduction we give can spawn the birth of the next big thing!

Beyoncé:: No Promotion was Marketing

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Friday I woke up to a stream of Beyoncé photos and screenshots of her new album in my Instagram feed.  In case you had not heard or are not a fan of Beyoncé, she released a new album on Friday, December the 13th.  This came as a shock and a surprise to most people because up until it’s release, there had been absolutely no promotion.  I found myself answering some of the teasing questions that accompanied the photo’s.  “What, ya’ll didn’t know Bey dropped a new album?”  Why, no, I did not.

While I think that Beyoncé has a great voice, I would not necessarily consider myself to be a huge fan.  I like her, but more so because she is from Houston, TX, which is where I am from and Destiny’s Child came out while I still lived there.  My Texas pride causes me to support artists (no matter what genre) that hail from Texas.  For that reason, I have been a supporter.  However, I haven’t bought a Beyoncé album in many, many years.  I bought this one.  Why?  Because of the pure genius of it’s release and because I had enough iTunes gift credits to cover the purchase.

I predict that this will be one of her highest grossing albums.  I am going to assume that the production costs for this, a visual album, were much higher than her previous albums and one way to cover that cost was a slimmed down marketing budget.  The genius of her releasing this album is this:

  1. The shock value is a form of marketing.  It also appeals to people’s “I need it now, and I want to be current, on trend, and in the know.”  No one wants to be left out and everyone wants to get in and be a part of something that they see as an “epic move.”  They will do this by buying the album.
  2. The bold move makes people curious.  People like me buy it for that reason alone.
  3. It is exclusive to buy the full album now, because individual songs will not be available for purchase for 7 full days after this release.
  4. It’s the holiday season, perfect timing to capitalize on sales.
  5. Make the people market for you.  My Instagram feed demonstrates this.  I did not know about the album, but thanks to social media I do and I was curious.
  6. Make the media market for you.  The news media is all about staying current and on top of trends these days.  They use social media to find out what people are talking about and build news stories around them.

By not promoting this album beforehand, she has probably gotten the biggest marketing value for her money than she ever has in the past.

 

2014 Marketing/Business Predictions

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I thought I would jump on the 2014 prediction bandwagon with a few of my own.  I think that 2014 will see some interesting shifts not so much in the type of marketing that we are seeing now in the digital landscape, but how it is done.  To explain, I will start with my first prediction:

More Quality Content

Content Marketing has been the big buzzword this year and I think it will continue to be a large part of marketer’s strategies in 2014.  With the advent of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, we will see an end to a focus on blog content that is irrelevant, keyword stuffed, unreadable, and created just for the sake of ranking high on search engines for traffic purposes.  Instead, we will see a high focus on more quality and relevant content.  I think this shift in focus, will lead to job growth in the writing arena, which leads me to my second prediction.

Freelance Writers will be in High Demand

I think we will see a boom in the writing industry.  As marketer’s look to provide more quality content, they will also use more copywriters, editors, etc to create and write this content.  I also think this is the next industry that will see a large growth in the number of “professionals” that can provide this content.  I think suddenly, everyone will be a “freelance copywriter.”  I feel the beginning stages of this have already started to happen.

Every time a new marketing trend pops up, there is suddenly a crop of “experts.”  Some truly are experts, but a lot are “experts.”  When social media marketing was the new buzz word, a new crop of social media marketers appeared.  Digital marketing…digital marketers.  SEO?  SEO experts popped up making claims of first page positions.  Now, we have content marketers, managers and curators and I fear we will see many more “experts” in 2014.  They will be joined by freelance writing “experts.”  Again, I believe that there are a lot of very real experts, but I think the “experts” give the real one’s a bad name.

So, there you have it.  My predictions for 2014.

“I Want to Blog to Make Money.”

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The title of this post is a statement that I hear fairly often.  Very recently, I had a conversation with a childhood friend of my mother’s about blogging.  I have been giving advisement to my sister-in-law, whom I like to refer to as just my sister, about her blog.  It started as a hobby for her and with a little advice, she has been able to turn it into something far greater and is earning a small income from the site in a very short amount of time.  My mother’s friend was looking for a part-time way to earn some extra income and my mother thought she should talk to me about blogging.  She was not entirely sure what a blog was or how to make one, but she knew she wanted to do it to make money.  By the end of the conversation (don’t worry, I told her this would end up becoming a blog post), I had talked her out of doing so.

 

Here is why:

Saying “I want to blog to make money” without any other goals, purpose, etc behind it, is like saying “I want to randomly make a commercial to air on tv.”  To me, blogging for business or some monetary gain is part of a marketing plan.  It is a marketing practice that helps to reach a goal.  The goal could be revenue in terms of pay per click ads on your site.  Another goal could be customer acquisition by putting you and your brand in front of more people.  Being a helpful resource to people of a particular niche is also a goal.  A blog can help to generate revenue in the same way a print advertisement, podcast or tv commercial spot can help to generate revenue.

Things a blog can do for you:

  • Increase the visibility of an author/writer
  • Make you the go-to guru for a particular niche
  • Create brand awareness
  • Create a community of like-minded individuals
  • Create a space for you to engage with an audience
  • Build an audience
  • Showcase your work/portfolio
  • Give insight into your company’s culture
  • Give helpful information
  • A lot more…

A blog can help generate revenue, but a blog with no purpose other than to make money; will not make money.

The other reason why I discouraged her from creating a blog was the time commitment.  The reason why she was looking for something part-time to do was because she had gone back to school and needed time to devote to her studies.  In order for any blog to be successful and especially for her purpose of making money, a lot of time has to be invested into it.  She would not only need to write daily or almost daily, but she would need to promote it, and also respond and engage with those that engaged with her.  My sister did not achieve success by blogging part-time.  She treats her blog as a full-time job.  Her dedication and time commitment to her blog has helped to make it as successful as it has been.  She also had a purpose that was not monetary.

She started blogging as an online journal where she shared stories of relationships with significant other’s, co-workers, family and friends.  I saw the beginnings of a creative writer and she took the concept and ran with it.  She also loves what she is doing which takes some of the edge off of the time commitment, while trying to run a household with young children at the same time.

I explained the amount of time and effort that was needed to my mother’s friend.  I also explained that she might come to resent the blog if her heart was not in it and the sole purpose was to try to make some money.  After explaining everything to her, she agreed that she did not have the time to commit to doing something so tedious.  We discussed some of her future plans upon graduation and I told her how a blog could complement those future endeavors…if the current tech/marketing landscape remained the same.

Although the outcome to the conversation did not help her to start a blog, it did help her get some insight into the “blogosphere” and different ways blogs were used for both business and for pleasure.  Having more insight, I think is what ultimately helped her to make her decision and I thought writing about the conversation, might help someone else that wants to “start a blog to make money.”

Working a Marketing Strategy into a New Product/Business Launch

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Yesterday, I talked about why marketing is important and today I will give you some ideas for how to work a marketing strategy into a new product or business launch.

 

Step 1 – Research

Before you can determine where you should market and how to market your product or business, you first have to determine, who the customer is.  You want to market and get your product/business in front of the person that is most likely to buy.  While you, as the product/business creator think that your product/business is awesome, you might not actually be the ideal customer for it.  You cannot build your marketing strategy around what would appeal to you, if you are not the target demographic.

For example, while discussing a client’s marketing strategy a few months back, I told them this exact thing.  They would not be their own customer; not for what we were marketing. This is not because they did not like the product or would not use the product, but because of the method of purchase.  We were working on marketing the online store portion of their business.  The client would purchase a product like the ones they are selling, but from a brick and mortar entity.  The client’s online shopper has different behaviors from the client’s other patrons.  Therefore, the strategy needed to be different to market the online store.

Knowing who the customer is will help you focus the strategy to appeal to that specific group of customers.  Targeting your message and strategy will increase the potential for sales.

 

Step 2 – Formulate A Plan

Like with anything you have to formulate a plan.  After all, that is what the word strategy means – a plan.  Use the information that you have learned from doing the marketing research to pinpoint where you should be marketing.  Would your marketing efforts pay off more offline or online?  Print advertisements?  Guerrilla marketing tactics?  Social media marketing?  Paid television or radio spots?

The research should tell you what your customer likes, what their habits are, whether they spend a lot of time online and how they spend that time online.  If your customer is not very active on social media, you do not need to invest a lot of time, money and energy in social media marketing from the start.  For example, a business associate had an insurance company that focused on health insurance options for senior citizens.  Their primary clients were senior citizens and their secondary client were the senior’s children that made the decision for them.  Offline marketing efforts, like ad placements in periodicals, were more effective than online efforts.  Both offline and online efforts had to have separate strategies because the demographic for each effort was very different.  The primary target was not online, but the secondary target was semi-active online.

 

Step 3 – Costing/Estimating

Once you have a plan for where and how you are going to market the product/business, you have to figure out how much it is all going to cost you.  This will become your marketing budget.

If you are using an agency for the execution of your strategy, get a quote.  Get several quotes and compare them to see which is the best agency for you to use.  You can typically save some money by using freelancers, but it may involve a little more work on your part to manage all of it.  Everyone that an agency will use in-house, you can find a freelance counterpart for.  There are freelance illustrators, copywriters, marketing consultants, brand managers, content managers, graphic designers, web designers, PR professionals, etc.  If the job position exists, there is a freelance professional that will fit the bill.  You could ideally build your own team/network of freelancers to work with.  Freelancers are often used to working or collaborating with other freelancers on projects.  Just make sure to get a quote from each.  It may be helpful to write up the project’s details, scope and what will be needed and done to present to the freelancers.  We tend to refer to this as a project or creative brief.  It will be easier for a freelancer to provide you with an accurate quote if they are furnished with a brief.

 

Step 4 – Execution

Now that you know who the ideal customer is, you know what your strategy will be and you have your team ready to make it happen; it is now time to pull the trigger and execute it.

While the strategy is in place and being executed, you will need to monitor things.  You want to make sure that you are seeing the results that you expected to see and if not, you need to analyze the numbers/results and try to determine why.  It may be because a portion of the strategy is not being executed properly, trends or technology changed or a current event has changed the attitudes/views of your target demographic.  The important thing is to stay diligent in monitoring the strategy and quickly make changes when needed.