Social Media, Startups, Strategy•
on November 29th, 2010•
For many small business owners, it is still difficult for them to realize how social media can be a big boost to the their communication strategy.
Communication strategy? Sounds stuffy, huh?
This is what you are creating when you come up with a series of promotion or advertising messages for your business. Your communications strategy is your plan on how you will court and develop a relationship with your customers.
Twitter and Facebook are phenomenal tools for businesses to use when executing upon a communication strategy. They are social media tools that can allow you an entry point to building, as well as managing customer relationships online.
The key part in all of this is that social media is an environment where people are actively sharing information to a managed audience that they have created. These clusters of audiences are potentially apart of your business’ audience. By having a presence in these environments this potentially allows people to share your brand and their experience with it, good or bad.
When adding this to your plan is best to have a religious like approach. Think about what you can give before you think about what you can get. By doing this you can potentially create “Little Oprah Winfrey’s” on the web. Oprah is great about sharing and giving her audience, products that she adores. There is something magical about this exchange that creates a buzz about products and brands. While you don’t have to give out products for free, you want enable people who have these audience clusters to share something about your product that makes it remarkably impossible to resist learning and potentially buying your product down the road.
While on the surface conversations on Twitter and Facebook seem like only chit chat, under all of that is the platform for you reach your consumer in a way that has never been possible before. Its time to get people chit chatting about your business.
Marketing•
on June 5th, 2010•
Everything? Yes everything.
The title of this post mirrors the title of a 1991 Harvard Business Review article and although it was written nearly 20 years ago, it’s amazing how many companies fail to realize that their business will rise and fall based on their marketing. While this is a pretty big statement, let me explain.
In order for your business to provide value to the customer, you have to bridge the gap between your product and your customer. Depending on how well a company listens and communicates with their customer, this will determine on how well they reduce the gap.
You ask, “What is this gap, thingy?”
The gap between a business and its customer is the relationship. The relationship is the bond between your business and the customer. If your bond is sticky, they will come back over and over again.
But you ask, “How does this tell me that everything about my business, is marketing?”
Well just like any bridge if the foundations are weak, the bridge can altogether collapse. So while you may not think the business relationship with your supplier could effect your customer relationship, it could because if your relationship falls apart with that supplier your product quality could be affected. In a service-based company, if you have a problem invoicing your customer correctly, this could take a toll on how your customer values your product. There are many scenarios that could pointed out, but I think you get the picture. Marketing has to happen on ever level throughout your company. It’s the consistent message to your internal and external customers, that everything is peachy over here. Not only do we have a great business, but in every experience throughout our company, you will see the same thing – a remarkable foundation.
This is important to a small business because you are building these foundations as we speak. And while you may have happy customers now, when (and this is the attitude you should have), when you are busting at the seams with new customers; your foundation will be tested.
How strong is your bridge? Is your foundation shaky?
