The Marketing Mix | official blog of the Marketing Mentor community

Business networking: Facebook, LinkedIn or neither?

Last year I launched a solo practice as a corporate writer and communications consultant. One of the initial questions I asked myself -- right after, "Can I make an honest (or dishonest) living doing this?" -- was where I stood on the whole social networking thing.

The first hurdle was deciding whether I even wanted to connect with prospective clients via online mingling. The second, once I'd given a half-hearted yes to the first, was whether the people I happened to mingle with would want to mingle with each other. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

I'm not on Facebook, for several reasons. First, the fact that two hundred million people have jumped onboard doesn't mean much to me. Two hundred million people probably tune in each week to Dancing with the Stars of Survivor: Krakatoa. That doesn't mean I have to. In fact it increases the likelihood that I won't.

We'll be at the HOW Design Conference in Austin

We are excited to launch a last-minute mini-track at the HOW Design Conference next month just for freelancers or would-be freelancers.

These brand-new sessions will all take place on Thursday, June 25. In addition to the presentations, we will each conduct a Town Hall session with a Q&A format, so bring any questions you have about pricing and promoting your work.

• Money Talk: How to Talk to Your Clients About Fees
• Freelancer Town Hall: Pricing and Money with Peleg Top
• Do You Have What It Takes to be a Successful Freelancer?
• Freelancer Town Hall: Marketing and Self-Promotion with Ilise Benun

Get all the details here: http://howconference.com/freelancesessions

Brussels Sprouts = Success?

What do brussels sprouts have to do with success? Check out the 2 webinars coming up, and you'll find out. They're both at the end of the day so you don't have to interrupt your busy day:

April 28, 7 PM Eastern (4 PM Pacific)
Cold Calling is the Brussels Sprouts of Marketing
with Ilise Benun and Colleen Wainwright (a.k.a. the communicatrix)
(includes brussels sprouts recipes) Details here: http://tinyurl.com/8umlju 
And listen to our audio cupcake #2 (of 3) here: http://www.audioacrobat.com/play/W2yjh087

May 4, 7 PM Eastern (4 PM Pacific)
What’s Working Right Now:
Real-World, First Hand Success Strategies from 3 Working Freelancers
with Ilise Benun and Dani Nordin, Patrice Robertie and Amy Weiher
Details here: http://www.howdesign.com/creativefreelancerwebinar

Going where the clients are

I've been to many design/marketing/technology conferences over the years. I find them inspiring and informative and I'm always energized to do even better work when I return. It’s also easy to prepare for an event where I will mostly encounter colleagues, as opposed to prospective clients. All I have to do is make sure I remember to bring lots of business cards.
 
But with renewed focus on growing my business, off I went to meet my target market at the CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) District I Conference in Boston. Being a designer among college development and alumni relations people required a completely different plan and mindset.

Here's what I did in advance: 

1. Researched like crazy. I spent too many hours on the conference web site reading about the sessions and the speaker bios. I Googled and checked on LinkedIn, then made myself 3 lists: interesting sessions, sessions my targets would most likely be in and speakers I might want to meet. (Note to conference committee: this would have been a lot easier if the web site was better organized and used readable typography.)

2. Posted a question to the CASE LinkedIn group about the conference. I got a response from one of the presenters who said it was a great networking opportunity. That started a conversation and we arranged to meet there. This proved to be the best move I made.

3. Got my game face on. Being an introvert, I admit that putting myself in the mix of strangers whose workstyles and areas of expertise are totally different from mine scared me. So I turned to Ilise's book, Stop Pushing Me Around!, for tips on questions to ask and ideas to offer. I also reread the chapter, "Be a Conference Commando," in Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi.

4. Set some goals that I could actually reach: Talk to at least 10 people. (Not a very high number for 2 days, but as I said, I'm an introvert.) Get ideas for enewsletter topics. Gain knowledge I can share w/my current clients. Get the attendee list. Check out the competition.

How'd I do? 
 

Problem Solving: Lessons Learned from an Electrician’s Service Call

I recently had an electrician come out to fix a lighting problem in my kitchen.  In the process I learned some lessons that are important for anyone who gets paid to solve problems – and that’s pretty much all of us, right?

You see, what should have been a 15-minute service call turned out to be a 2-hour one.  I’ll spare you the details (although I do have to relay a few in my points below).  The short story is the guy spent about an hour trying to determine what was causing the problem but ended up having to call in his partner to help.  After the second guy arrived, it took them another 45 minutes before they stumbled across the real source of the problem and then they were able to fix it right away.

As I reflected on what happened, I realized the ways they went about trying to fix the problem were all wrong – and yet, if I’m really honest with myself, I find that I’m probably guilty of using the same methods to address my clients’ challenges.  Perhaps some of these will sound familiar to you:

1.  Jumping to conclusions

What happened:  To demonstrate the problem to the electrician, I used a dimmer switch that happens to be one of those newer dual-function ones (dimmer and on/off.)  The unusual nature of the switch caught the guy’s attention and he immediately pronounced that the problem was probably caused by the switch.  While it soon became clear the switch was not the problem, his initial reaction seemed to bias his perspective for the remainder of his visit.  He kept on returning to the switch, convinced there had to be something wrong with it.

Lesson learned:  Avoid the temptation to think we have the answer right away.

Psychologists use the term “the primacy effect” to refer to the cognitive bias that results from the disproportionate salience of initial stimuli or observations. For example, we are more likely to remember words we’ve read toward the beginning of a long list, for example, than words we’ve read in the middle.  As problem solvers, we might be guilty of allowing the primacy effect to cloud our judgment and lead us down the wrong path.

Instead of jumping to conclusions, we should exercise discipline and conduct a thorough analysis before we offer a diagnosis.

Networking is about quality, not quantity

One of my projects as a solopreneur is to manage a networking group for manufacturing companies in my region. Through a stroke of sheer randomness, a search for manufacturing in Kansas City on Google brings our little humble site up #1, without any formal SEO effort on my part. But do you know who is searching for manufacturing in Kansas City? Not manufacturers; salespeople who want to sell stuff to manufacturers.

While I am happy to talk to anyone about the network, many aspiring networkers seem to think there are shortcuts to crossing the sales finish line. The manufacturing network is just one example, but I seem to run across more of these situations when the economy is slow. In the spirit of March Madness here are 3 situations that could either turn into a foul or a 3-pointer. Which will it be for you?

Foul: Your target market is widget makers. You find an organization of widget makers and think, ‘I’ve hit the jackpot!’ and proceed to make your pitch to all of the widget makers in the room.

3 Pointer: Even if your product or service is the saving grace of every last person in the room, they don’t know you, know your company, and you can’t presume to know their needs. At first, just be quiet and listen to what your prospects have to say. Enthusiasm is contagious, but so is the flu.

Go ahead, get emotional

Over the last year I’ve been teaching a communication and conflict resolution course for a corporate client of mine. Most of the material in this program comes from the New York Times best-seller, Crucial Conversations. One of the tools that the book teaches is called “Master My Stories”. The idea behind this tool is that how we feel lies in the stories we tell ourselves.  And these stories generate emotions that often lead to actions. We create our stories.

When you think about marketing your business or product,  your goal is to generate action from your clients and prospects. And an effective way to generate action is to tell a compelling story, one that hits your customer’s emotions.  Take a look at your marketing materials, your website, your newsletters, your printed collateral and ask yourself: “What emotions am I hitting?”.  Which feeling will your customer generate when they see your stuff?

If you look at the majority of service companies (especially in the creative industry), the common story is all about who they are and what they do best.  If I’m the customer, why would I believe them? What would compel me to trust that they really know what MY problem is? What my needs are? No feelings are generated and I will pass over them without a second thought.

As you are creating marketing materials to promote your business ask yourself the following questions:

   1. What are your clients' hot buttons? What’s not working for them?
   2. What is the outcome your client is asking for (not the specific thing they need from you)?
   3. Is your story creating an emotional reaction with your client?

So think about the stories you can create with your marketing. Stories that will generate a feeling with your client. A feeling that will inspire them to pick up the phone and call you. Hit their emotions and they will respond.

Growing Your Business with Marketing, Week 12: Following up & keeping on

This is Week 12 of a 52-week project/experiment in DIY marketing. Armed with nothing but a copy of the 2009 Grow Your Business Marketing Plan + Calendar and my bare wits, I'm applying the skills you need to grow a business in real time, day by day, and reporting on them week by week. You can follow along here every Monday; check in with my companion blog, A Virgo's Guide to Marketing, for additional links and information.

If you're working the Veteran's Calendar literally, you'll be launching your site this week. I've been tweaking mine, adding pages and features and thinking about some long-term plans for making it more manageable (and fun, which will keep it more manageable for me).

It's been a full week since I got back from my biggest conference of the year, South by Southwest Interactive, and I'm still playing a lot of catchup. (Mmm...ketchup....) I have yet to follow up with everyone I met, or even to get them into my system, but I have this project to keep me honest, so I know I will.

This week has been mostly about me recovering from the excitement and crazy expenditure of energy, and yes, even grappling with the little bit of depression involved in coming down off of a high. SXSW is a mentally energizing experience, but translating that into day-to-day work and maintaining the "high" on a long-term basis can get tricky. There's even a panel on it at the conference, so I know I'm not the only one dealing with this issue. Here's what I've set up to help me so far...

What’s in your ‘keep in touch’ toolbox?

You’ve heard us say this before. Networking is one of the strongest marketing tools you can use to grow your business. Well a big part of networking happens not only face to face at schmoozing events, it keeps happening if you follow up with people.

Keeping in touch is a key part of this game. It’s a big part of building a relationship and in business, relationships are everything. So what’s your ‘keep in touch’ plan? Especially as we are in a weird economy with some of us not knowing when the next client is coming from it’s a good idea to plan how to keep in touch with clients and prospects and create the right tools to do so.

So today I’d like to start a series of posts that can help you create your own ‘keep in touch’ toolbox. I’ll share some ideas that worked well for me in the past and hopefully some of them will inspire you to try something new.

First tool in the ‘keep in touch’ toolbox is the “Touching Base Connection”.  Send a short email message to the clients who you haven’t worked with in a while and to prospects just to say hello. I bet if you looked in your address book right now you can pick at least 30 people to get in touch with. Write them each a short, personalized email and say something like:

Dear Dan,

It’s been a while since we’ve connected. I was just looking through my address book and your name jumped out of the crowd!.

Just thought I’d send you a quick note to say hello and see how things are going on your end. 

Would be great to hear from you sometime soon!

Best,

Peleg

Note how this email does not ask for anything in particular. It’s simply starting a conversation. It’s casual and it’s in your own friendly voice. Let your personality come through and keep it professional. You never know where that could lead to. 

And for those of you who are brave enough to try this in person, I dare you to pick up the telephone  and over the next week call 30 of your clients and prospects and just say hello. You game?

Do you have 7 minutes?

Our friends at workingsolo.com have put together a quick 7 minute survey for small business owners. By taking this survey, you will get a chance to win one of 24 prizes including a $500 gift certificate to Amazon.com or a new iPod. All small business owners in the USA (18 years or older) are invited to participate.

Click here to take the survey.