This, in two words, is the secret of the new marketing.
Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you…
Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.
If they don’t love it, you need a new product. Start over.
Your idea spreads. Your business grows. Not as fast as you want, but faster than you could ever imagine.
This approach changes the posture and timing of everything you do.
You can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They’re not anonymous and they’re not masses. You can only market to people who are willing participants. Like this group of ten.
The timing means that the idea of a ‘launch’ and press releases and the big unveiling is nuts. Instead, plan on the gradual build that turns into a tidal wave. Organize for it and spend money appropriately. The fact is, the curve of money spent (big hump, then it tails off) is precisely backwards to what you actually need.
Three years from now, this advice will be so common as to be boring. Today, it’s almost certainly the opposite of what you’re doing.
April 2, 2009
Today, as you've no doubt discovered, is April Fools, the official holiday of the web.
I had, as I do every year, a fools post written and queued up. (It was about JD Salinger and the Dalai Lama as twitter users.) It was good, not great.
So I posted nothing.
I couldn't exceed my (or your) expectations, so I posted nothing.
That's a brave thing to do and a good feeling as well. Next time all you have is 'good', try nothing on for size.
April 1, 2009
Ten years ago, you had a wide range of excuses for being a lousy visuals person. Starting with no talent, leading to no skill and going from there.
But now, in a world where it is expected that professionals will be able to make beautiful powerpoint slides, handsome business cards, clever bio photos and a decent website, it's as important as driving. And easier to learn and do, and requiring less talent.
No, you and I will never be gifted designers or breakthrough designers. But there's really no reason not to be really good.
I put together a page with some blogs, books and sites you can check out. An hour a day for a month and you won't have to hide your face in shame. Sure, hire the very best in the world when you need a breakthrough. But you don't have to pay for better-than-mediocre design. You can do it yourself.
(Update: as expected, I heard from a few designers, upset that I would recommend that anyone do pretty good design. The thing is, as a designer, if all you can offer is a time-saving way to get pretty good design, that's a tough row to hoe. The magic for the great designer is that once someone understands how to see, understands how powerful great design can be… they are going to be the first person who wants to hire you.
The fact is, business people do copywriting, simple legal and accounting work and more, on their own, every day. You compose your own email, don't you? If your legal decisions were as bad as your design, you'd get fired in a minute for libeling people. Getting pretty good at things is merely a first step, but one that you need to take in order to be ready to spend the money to get great.)
March 31, 2009
The first mistake marketers make is that they want more. More customers, more noise, more ads, more shelf space, more customers, more customers, more customers…
Almost all of their actions are driven by the search for more customers.
The reason this is a mistake is simple: it's expensive. Attracting a new customer costs far more than keeping an old one happy. Not only that, but an old customer is far more likely to bring you new people via word of mouth than someone who isn't even a customer yet.
Which is why share of wallet makes so much more sense than share of market. How much does each of your existing customers buy from you? Do they count on you for all the things they buy in this market, or just some? Does Toyota sell me every car my family drives? Does Chubb get to insure every single thing I own? Usually not. Because marketers are so focused on more that they forget to take great care of what they've got.
Hugh Macleod, gifted cartoonist and profane marketing blogger is now making his living selling limited edition art work based on his cartoons. He's a brilliant marketer, of course, so he's not focused on more. He's focused on share of wallet. On selling his dedicated fans a remarkable souvenir that they can keep and display.
So, what's the problem? Share of wall. Unlike records or shoes, it's hard to buy a lot of art. Pretty soon, you've got no place left to put it, do you? Share of wallet turns into share of wall and you can't grow any more.
That's why you need to be realistic about how much share of wallet you can honestly expect, and why job one is delighting existing customers so much that they can't help but tell their friends. Preferably friends with very big houses.
March 30, 2009
If you find 100 comments on a blog post or 100 reviews of a new book or 100 tweets about you…
and two of them are negative, while 98 are positive…
which ones are you going to read first?
If you're a human being and you're telling the truth, the answer is pretty obvious: you want to know which misguided losers had nasty things to say and you want to know what they said. In fact, if we're being totally truthful, it's likely you're going to take what the critics had to say to heart.
That's a shame. The critics are never going to be happy with you, that's why they're critics. You might bore them by doing what they say… but that won't turn them into fans, it will merely encourage them to go criticize someone else.
It doesn't matter what Groucho or Elvis or Britney or any other one-name performer does or did… the critics won't be placated. Changing your act to make them happy is a fool's game.
Here's a surprising thought, though. You should ignore your fans as well.
Your fans don't want you to change, your fans want you to maintain the essence of what you bring them but add a laundry list of features. You fans want lower prices and more contributions, bigger portions and more frequent deliveries.
So, who should you listen to?
Your sneezers.
You should listen to the people who tell the most people about you. Listen to the people who thrive on sharing your good works with others. If you delight these people, you grow.
March 29, 2009
If you make something remarkable, that's because there's something to talk about.
But often, if you've created something worth talking about, it's something that hasn't been done before. Which means it needs a name.
So name it.
That extra sharp point on the top of your new rock climbing shoe? It's a baxter.
That service you get at the spa after your massage is over? Oh, you mean the baxter!
That free course in between the main course and dessert? Right… the baxter.
Sorry, "baxter" is already taken. It's my name for that new thing you invented that's worth talking about. You'll need to find a new word that people can use to describe your baxter.
(Heels on Wheels is a baxter. So is the 3/50 project.)
March 28, 2009
Why spend $10,000 to do a photo shoot for a magazine? After all, all your profit is in the ads.
Sometimes it seems like people who build websites and magazines that take the high road aren't paying any attention at all to conversion and revenue and manipulation.
The low road of media ought to work. After all, it's filled with tricks that have been tested and shown to work. On a website, a pop up, a popunder, a cloaked IP address, a persistent window that won't go away, loud headlines and calls to action… all of these things should convert.
We saw the same thing with magazines over the last few decades. You can fill a magazine with come ons, get rich quick claims and guaranteed results… and yet Conde Nast (home of The New Yorker) and other high road publications made more money and had happier advertisers…
The reason manipulative media doesn't work as well as you might expect is that people have a choice. Sure, on a per thousand basis, the manipulative tricks you might decide to use seem to work, but people don't have to show up in the first place. Generally, the people who do show up for these low road attempts at manipulation aren't the right people to begin with.
I see this every day at Squidoo, blogs and other user generated pages. People who build pages that are generous, filled with useful information and generally focused on teaching people do extremely well. They get a lot of traffic, a ton of clickthroughs and earn money every day. And yet, countless businesses in search of a quick buck show up with obviously selfish scams involving Forex and affiliate-Bank and 'exclusive' offers. And they fail, again and again. They fail because people who have a choice don't participate.
Data is your friend. And the data shows that the top blogs, top lenses, top magazines… they all follow the high road. If you need to be manipulative or non-transparent to make a buck, time to rethink the plan.
March 27, 2009
Do you have one? Some folks are going to eight hours of meeting a day. At Ford, they used to have meetings to prepare for meetings, just to be sure everyone had their story straight.
If you're serious about solving your meeting problem, getting things done and saving time, try this for one week. If it doesn't work, I'll be happy to give you a full refund.
- Understand that all problems are not the same. So why are your meetings? Does every issue deserve an hour? Why is there a default length?
- Schedule meetings in increments of five minutes. Require that the meeting organizer have a truly great reason to need more than four increments of realtime face time.
- Require preparation. Give people things to read or do before the meeting, and if they don't, kick them out.
- Remove all the chairs from the conference room. I'm serious.
- If someone is more than two minutes later than the last person to the meeting, they have to pay a fine of $10 to the coffee fund.
- Bring an egg timer to the meeting. When it goes off, you're done. Not your fault, it's the timer's.
- The organizer of the meeting is required to send a short email summary, with action items, to every attendee within ten minutes of the end of the meeting.
- Create a public space (either a big piece of poster board or a simple online page) that allows attendees to rate meetings and their organizers on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of usefulness. Just a simple box where everyone can write a number. Watch what happens.
- If you're not adding value to a meeting, leave. You can always read the summary later.
This is all marketing. It's a show, one that lets your team know you're treating meetings differently now.
March 26, 2009
I've been thinking a lot about issues of scale and units of measure.
Many businesses that are in trouble are in trouble for a simple reason: they're the wrong size.
A newspaper that only had a few dozen employees would be doing great today. But they have hundreds or thousands of employees because that was an appropriate scale twenty years ago. When I started my first web company fifteen years ago, the idea that you could be successful with six or ten employees was crazy, but today many of the most successful companies have not many more than that. That's 15,000 fewer employees than eBay has.
It's tempting to get bigger. But is bigger better? In many cases, it's worse, particularly when you can leverage reliable systems that are cheaper and faster and more stable in the outside world. If you can make your product better by assembling it yourself, you should. But if that action makes it worse, why do it?
Which leads to the idea of figuring out what the unit of manufacture or delivery is. Do you deliver the entire solution or just a piece of it? Twitter delivers a sentence, sandwiched in between two other people's sentences. A blog delivers a series of longer pieces, sandwiched in between other pieces by the same person. A website delivers page after page of pieces, all from the same organization. What's the unit that works right now?
Creative Computing delivered an MP3 player. That was the unit. Apple changed this and delivered the player, the software, the music store, the headphones and the retail outlet. Both sold music, ultimately, but Apple choose a far wider unit. Very risky, but it worked.
The flip side works as well. If you want Kona coffee in Senseo pods, the web makes it easy to find. Aloha doesn't have to subsidize the cost of the entire system, worry about shelf space or build coffee makers. They can just make a profit from a small piece of the entire system.
Ford Motor used to hire shepherds to tend Ford sheep on Ford land so they could weave Ford fabric to put on the seats of Ford cars. Today, of course, that's crazy. One day soon there will be car companies that have 200 employees.
So many businesses are stuck on tradition. What happens to your agency or brokerage or factory or freelance practice when you make the unit of measure bigger? smaller? Why are you assuming that your scale is correct?
March 25, 2009
Why people choose to visit online social sites:
- Who likes me?
- Is everything okay?
- How can I become more popular?
- What's new?
- I'm bored, let's make some noise
None of these are new, but in the digital world, they're still magnetic.
If you want to understand why Twitter is so hot, look at those five attributes. They deliver all five, instantly.
March 24, 2009
