To Succeed in 2012, Get Engaged: #7 in the Top 10 Small Business Marketing Ideas for 2012

#7 in my top 10 marketing ideas for small business in 2012 is this: 

To succeed in 2012, you're going to have to get engaged. And as in any good love story, unless you’re part of an arranged marriage, you’ll never get engaged if you don’t ever meet so you need to ‘be’ where your customers ‘are.’

 Once you’ve found them, you need to engage them.To do that, you need to know how to engage them.To engage them, you need to understand what it means:

en-gage: v.

1. To involve oneself or become occupied; participate: engage in conversation.
2. To assume an obligation; agree.
3. To enter into conflict or battle: The armies engaged at dawn.
4. To become meshed or interlocked: The gears engaged.

Look at the definition,
it’s almost a picture of the customer life cycle.

• One, become involved (prospect finds you, or you find them, and an interaction occurs).
• Two, assume an obligation (they agree to pay, you agree to provide services and/or products in return).
• Three, to enter into conflict or battle (sure, it’s a stretch, but I’m going to liken this to the customer, becoming involved in your battle – to grow your business – by telling others about you or choosing to purchase from you again).
• And four, to become meshed or interlocked: based on 1-3, you now have developed customer loyalty and even brand advocacy.

To do any of that, you need to know them (both your current and desired/ideal customers).

You need to have an idea of the shared interests, values and passions of your current customers, and you need to have an idea of those of your ideal client types (those you most want to attract, or want to be able to attract in the future) as well.

Engagement – and the potential to move someone through to the next level of engagement – occurs any time you come into contact with a prospect or customer. That means that opportunities for engagement will occur both within your business and without.

The interactions that will engage people – get them to want to do business with you, to want to do business with you again, to want to tell others about you, and to want to do business only with you (when it comes to the products and services you provide) – these types of interactions will be those where alignment of emotional connection and relevance (what you have is actually something they need) occurs.

Make 2012 the year that you truly connect with your customers. Find out where they live, what they truly want and need, what stirs their passions, what things they believe in, what they value in and about your community, and so on. Make 2012 the year that you truly engage with people on behalf of your business. Get engaged – it’s going to be a great year!

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Play to Win: #6 in my Top 10 Small Business Marketing Musts for 2012

If you watch a lot of football (like I do), it’s not uncommon to watch your favorite team gain an edge over their opponent and get a small lead. Then, with a few minutes left on the clock, for reasons I will never understand, they abandon the strategy which helped them get the lead (which usually involved assertive play and calculated risk taking on both offense and defense) and start playing “not to lose,” hoping to run out the clock before the other team can gain the lead.

What inevitably happens is that the other team is able to take advantage of this less aggressive style of play.

They stop your offense, because you’re trying to keep the ball on the ground and you fail to make a needed first down. And once they get the ball back, they march right down the field into scoring range because your defense isn’t working as hard to force a turnover and they aren’t taking the calculated risks needed to put extra men where they think the next play is going to be.

So how does this relate to your business?

You worked hard to get your business established; you took calculated risks and tried things you hadn’t tried before in order to gain an edge. Now that you’ve gained some ground, you’re so afraid to lose your position that you start playing “not to lose” instead of playing to win.

• You’ve got a few hundred (or thousand) fans on Facebook or Twitter but you’re so afraid of one or two of them “unliking” your page that you’re afraid to post things that will provoke and connect with people emotionally. You’re afraid to speak passionately on social media. Your posts are about as exciting as a bowl of oatmeal (which, incidentally, is how they're making your brand look, as well).  You’re afraid that if you post more than once a day someone will get annoyed and stop reading your posts.
  
  So you’re not playing to win on social media, you’re playing “not to lose.”

• Instead of adding value and changing your lineup – taking a few calculated risks in order to compete in the new economy, you’re holding on to the way you’ve always done things. You are more focused on not losing one or two customers than you are on gaining new ones by making changes you need to make within your business.

• Instead of making your business – and your customer experience – truly unique, you’re playing it safe by keeping things as generic as possible.  And so once the customer walks out, there's nothing memorable to make them want to come back and nothing that makes them want to tell their friends about you.  

• Instead of engaging with your customers through communications, you’re so worried that someone might unsubscribe from your emailing list if you actually email them that you never do it at all; or at most, you send one or two one-and-done offers and a holiday greeting each year.

Or even worse, maybe you don’t have a playbook at all, and everything that you are doing is being done as a one-and-done, because there is no short or long term strategy in play.

There’s still time on the clock: are you going to play not to lose? Or play to win?


***

Elizabeth Kraus, author of 365 Days of Marketing and the 2012 Small Business Marketing Calendar: Little White Marketing Lies.

Dispel all the little white marketing lies that might be holding your business back - check out the 2012 Small Business Marketing Calendar: Little White Marketing Lies on amazon.com.  With hundreds of marketing ideas laid out for 2012, you'll get into a marketing groove and build a bigger role for your business in the lives of your clients!

  

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Understand the Law of Reflection: #5 in my Top 10 Small Business Marketing Musts for 2012

How many times have you wondered what it would take to turn one time customers into repeat customers, to turn repeat customers into exclusively loyal ones -- to attract and develop a group of people willing to refer, recommend and otherwise talk about your brand to others.

How many times have you felt powerless and hopeless when it comes to getting your employees to think more like stakeholders – people who have a vested interest in the health and well-being of the company and so become engaged and loyal to the business (not just the paycheck, and make decisions that are in the best interest of the company, even if it's not always comfortable or most convenient for themselves.

How many times have you wondered why you aren’t converting more search engine results, blog post links and other web site visitors into online sales and in-store visits.

Here’s the secret. 

People don’t buy from companies, they buy from people. 

People don’t develop loyalty to companies, they become loyal – and sometimes addicted – to the things that companies do for them or how they make them feel.

Getting found by search engines, having your blog posts read and getting people to your website is a preliminary step; only what happens after that point – the engagement and emotional connection built into the online experience – produces sales, booked appointments and in-store visits.

Only what occurs after someone walks into your store in terms of engagement and emotional connection produces desired results at the cash register, repeat visits and referrals.

Employees don’t think like stakeholders when they’re treated like tools. (Take that any way you like.) And all if it can be attributed to what I call the ‘Law of Reflection.’

And here is its shortest, sweetest version:
no one is going to put more into a relationship than you. 

Employees won’t invest themselves personally in the well-being of your company until they feel that you are invested in them. Clocking in does not produce engagement. If you want them to act like a stakeholder, you’ve got to give them reasons to feel like one, first.

Customers don’t become loyal to you until you become loyal to them, making them #1 in your focus and thinking, and making it your goal to benefit them and improve their lives. (Notice how “sell stuff to them” is nowhere to be found in that statement.)

The relationship and loyalties that customers develop toward you and your business is a direct reflection of your commitment to and interest in them. Likewise, the loyalty and engagement that employees demonstrate toward your business is a direct reflection of not only your policies and employee culture but also of how much (or little) you take the time to educate and train them and of how important you make them feel that they are to you, and to your business.

Understanding the Law of Reflection is the first step on the road to loyalty and engagement, changing the way that you think about your business and set goals and priorities must follow.

Remember, just like with a pool of water or even a mirror, the reflection (the way customers or employees feel about you and your business) is never going to be clearer or stronger than the original, and you are responsible for creating the original side of those relationships.

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Let's Get Engaged!

The secret for small business (or any-sized business) success is not just attracting customers or getting one sale, it's engaging them over the long haul.

Engaged customers believe they are part of something. They believe they are important to you and to your business.

Apart from having a family or social connection to your business, the only way a client will become engaged will be because you deliberately plan and provide consistent client experiences that demonstrate to them, over the passage of time, clearly and unmistakably, that they are a unique, valued and vitally important person in your life, personally, as well as your business.

It’s not that they love you or even the products or services your business provides.
It’s that you've convinced them that they are important to you.

Think about it in romantic terms. Would you ‘engage’ or commit yourself to a long-term relationship with someone if you didn’t believe that they truly cared about you—enough so that they care about you more than themselves and put your interests above theirs?

That’s what it takes to stimulate engagement!

Elizabeth Kraus | 12monthsofmarketing.com

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Little White Marketing Lie #5: We're Just One Great Idea Away from Success

Little white lies are falsities we tell people (and sometimes tell ourselves) that we believe to be benign, harmless. But there are little white marketing lies we tell all the time that may be hurting our businesses:

Little White Marketing Lie #5: We’re just one great idea away from overnight success.

Most of the time, 'overnight success' is achieved only after years and years of hard work and much trial and error. It’s not about one great idea. Success is usually the result of trying one more time, and one more time after that. It’s about experimenting, refining and continually improving. It’s about demanding the best of yourself, and then asking for a little bit more.

All of history is on my side on this one.

As Thomas Edison, the famous U.S. inventor famously said, “Genius is 2% inspiration and 98% perspiration.” And maybe he said it even better in his autobiography when he simply stated, “There is no substitute for hard work.” And that’s why so many people prefer to believe the myth that it will be a great idea that brings them success – after all – who wants to work hard? Who wants to fail? Repeatedly?

Edison did, and if you want to succeed, you’ll adopt his mentality. He didn't view himself as a failure, even though he failed hundreds of times while trying to invent the light bulb. He told reporters who asked him about those hundreds of failures that he’d merely succeeded in determining what didn’t work. And knowing what doesn’t work is important, too. Knowing what doesn’t work keeps you from going down the wrong roads, chasing phantoms (apparitions like the myth of “overnight success.”)

The truth is, you’re closer to success than you realize. You already had a great idea, that’s why you’re in business. The idea of your business may not be unique in and of itself, but how you do business can be.

There aren’t shortcuts and there are few serendipitous 'post-it-note' accidents that result in overnight business super-stardom. Not to mention the fact that you don’t want to go down in history as a one-hit wonder! History is replete with companies that had a great idea or business concept and started strong, but got stuck.

Take Steve Jobs, for example, who said, “Stay hungry, stay foolish,” speaking at a commencement address Year after year, project after project, Steve Job’s company and products took the market by surprise, and by storm. Without demanding and fostering an innovative and unique internal culture, it’s likely that his great ideas would have been someone else’s to capitalize on.

For most successful businesses, the secret isn’t in having a great idea. Amazon sold books, hardly innovative and there were many booksellers in the business before them. There’s nothing new about what they did. But HOW they sold books, how they fulfilled orders, the ease and convenience and value they built into doing business with them – that was their genius. Doing it right, over and over again, and doing it differently than the others.

It’s not what they do, it’s how they do it.

Lands End? Zappos? Again, there is nothing particularly innovative about selling shoes or clothes. But these businesses are genius – and consequently successful – because of the way they fulfill orders, the way they stand behind their products and the culture they provide for their employees. Believing that happy employees will translate into happy customers, they built their policies and business around this core value.

So don’t focus on trying to discover a genius offering. Instead, channel the bulk of your creative energies into perfecting the customer experience your business provides by (1) delivering on your promises to the customer, every time, and (2) making the customer experience at your business unique, different from competitors and more than the customer expects, in ways that are attractive and meaningful to your customers.

[ Subscribe ] to my e-mail newsletter to get the next little white marketing lie - and more - delivered right to your inbox—it's going to be a great year!

Elizabeth Kraus – 12monthsofmarketing.com
365 Days of Marketing is available on amazon.com in book and digital formats.

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