Getting more out of your networking

May 11, ’12 2:43 PM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Business Marketing, Small Business / SOHO

A colleague of mine, Barclay Thompson of Clear Business Development, shared the following link (from Nigel Botterill called Networking – The Surest Way to Stay Poor?) with me the other day.

Following that we met up for coffee earlier today to talk about blogging, which I do quite a bit of, and a general catch up.

During our conversation we got round to the article that he had shared with me and we got to talking about networking, in general, and our views on it.

This got me started on a bit of a rant about open networking. You see, I think Nigel has a point, but I would go further.

Personally, I don’t like open networking as most people I meet seem to be intent on talking ‘at’ people and are out to get something for themselves. A not so subtle way of trying to sell themselves or their products in many cases.

Barclay concurred and agreed that it’s best to listen to people so that we can get to know each other better and so better understand how we can help them. I agree with Barclay but in our conversation we agreed that we need to think more broadly about the idea ‘how we can help them’.

Our help should not be limited to what we, personally and in our businesses, can do for someone but should include who we know that we trust and can help that person.

I believe that we need to gauge our networking not just by how much business we gain from it but also from how many people we have connected and helped with introductions.

Networking comes from the word ‘network’, the strength of which is based on its connections. If you are only concerned with what you can get from your network then, I believe, you are only building weak, one-way and transactional relationships. However, if you adopt the principle ‘give before receive’ then I believe you will get more out of your networking, become a more trusted node in your network, get known as more of a ‘go-to’ guy or girl in your community and, in the end will benefit more in the long run.

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Are you and your customers using the same language to find each other?

May 1, ’12 4:17 PM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Business Marketing, Business Psychology, Marketing/PR, Online Marketing

Have you tried to find yourself lately?

Now, that’s not meant to be soul-searching philosophical question. What I mean by the question is, have you considered what your customers are really looking for recently? How would they describe what they are looking for? Does it match with your description of yourself, your business and the products or services that you provide?

Think of it this way. Many people buy things to help them achieve other things. For example, say you have bought some shelves from Ikea and needed a drill to help you put them up. Then, you might search for ‘drill for putting up shelves’ in Google. That’s a pretty normal thing to do these days. Right?

However, if you did go to Google and searched that phrase you’d get a series of results (see them here) that are all to do with DIY instructions about how to put up shelves. However, none of them on the first couple of pages (how many of us go beyond the first couple of pages when looking for something anyway?) provide suggestions as to what type of drill would be the best choice for such a job. So, if I were someone who might be looking for a ‘drill for putting up shelves’ how would I know what drill to buy and where to buy it from?

This might be an extreme example but do you see my point?

Often there is a difference between how we view ourselves, how we describe ourselves, the things we sell and how others (our customers) describe what they buy from us.

It’s all about language and how we use. Too often do I come across businesses that get lost in the technical day to day language of what they do that they forget that the way that they talk about what they sell may be very different to the language used by customers that buy their product.

I know these differences exist from personal experience when a couple of months ago I asked my newsletter subscribers about why they bought from me or what they thought was my Unique Selling Proposition (USP). I wrote about the results in Find out if your marketing and your business are saying the same thing to your customers and those around you.

The results were fascinating and illuminating and have helped me better understand how to reach my customers in ways that fit with what they are looking for.

So, how do your customers find you? What’s their journey to your shop or front door or website or meeting place? And, are you using their language to help them find you?

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6 ways to better blog content

Apr 16, ’12 3:17 PM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Blogging, Business Marketing, Marketing/PR, Online Marketing

I was talking with a colleague earlier today and we were discussing blogging, marketing and how to engage with your customers and with more customers.

I’m a great believer in blogging being a really powerful marketing tool. (I’ve written about blogging and marketing here before in Inbound marketing – it’s new and it’s hard but we must get better at it and Content Marketing: Create, Repurpose, Recycle, Curate). However, we agreed that many businesses find blogging quite a bit of a struggle as they very quickly run out of things to write about and ways to say what they want to say.

As a few ways of getting started finding and creating great content for your blog, here’s some of the tools and methods that I use.

Use Google Alerts. If you go to: Google.com/alerts, you can type in any subject or topic or area that you’re interested in and Google will send you alerts that are news, industry or blog based when new content is published or they find material that fits what you are interested in. This is a great way to find, comment on and share information that readers of your blog or your niche will find useful and interesting. It’s free too.
Bookmarking Sites like Delicious.com or Digg.com can be really helpful in finding interesting stories that are relevant to your niche.
Clipping. Related to number two is clipping. I find that when I see things in a newspaper or magazine then I’ll generally tear out the article that caught my eye and put it in my notebook so that I can write about it later. I do the same online but use an application called Evernote.com to ‘clip’ pages and articles that I find online so that I can return to them later when I am on or offline.
Guest posting. It’s a myth that you need to create all of your content yourself and so guest posting ie. asking someone else like one of your customers or one of your suppliers to write a piece or a series of posts for you can be a great way to add different perspectives, voices and personalities to your blog. However, a few things that you should keep in mind are:
- It is your blog so always be clear about what you want them to write about (or get them to come up with ideas that they think could fit with your blog and then agree a topic); and
- Remember, it is your blog so never publish anything that you are not happy with.
Interviews. Whether in text-based question and answer format or audio or video format, interviews are great ways to share different stories and perspectives from your employees, customers or suppliers and are great ways for people visiting your blog to get to know the real and personal side to your business.
Other experts. You will obviously be an expert in your own field, right? But, I bet you don’t know everything, right? Therefore, keeping in touch with other players and experts in your field whether it is by subscribing to their blog or their newsletter is another great way to find new ideas and perspectives on things to write about.

These are six ways that I use to help me generate content for my own and this blog. What others do you use that I can learn from you?

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Waiting for complaints to respond to is normal. Going looking for them is better

Apr 5, ’12 7:03 PM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Business Marketing, Customer Service, Marketing/PR, do customer service

I was talking with a bunch of business owners the other day and was explaining a phenomena called The Complaint Iceberg. I’ve written about it a bit more here.

To bring the concept to life I asked if anyone had gone to a restaurant, as an example, and

Had a bad enough experience that they complained; and
Had an experience that was not quite bad enough to complain but they vowed to themselves they would never go back again.

A few people put their hand up to the first option but everyone put their hand up to the second. They also said that in both cases they would tell all of their friends about their experience.

Talk about punching a hole in your marketing efforts.

Most companies are ready to respond to complaints, some are good at it but only a few really go looking for these ‘silent’ complaints.

The ones that do are particularly open to feedback from everyone everywhere and are tenacious in their pursuit of the silence.

They do this via clever emails, web feedback tools, letters, postcards and timely phone calls.

In doing this, there is no guarantee that your ‘silent’ complainers will talk to you but if you do going looking there are three things that will happen:

You’ll show that you really care about your business and your customers
You will find some ‘silent’ complaints that you can then put right; and
You’ll reduce some of the negative word of mouth that exists about your business that normally you would have known nothing about.

Are you ready to pursue the silence?

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Focus more of your marketing on customer retention

Mar 21, ’12 8:27 PM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Business Marketing, Business Psychology, Marketing/PR, grow your business

In my previous post (The Questions I Would Ask If I Were Marketing Your Business – Comment and Part 1) I posed two questions:

How much of your current business comes from existing clients and how much comes from new clients?
How much of your marketing efforts are focused on generating new clients and how much is focused on generating repeat business from your existing clients?

Now, I would wager that if you have an established business then the answer to question 1 will be that most of your business comes from existing clients and that the answer to question 2 is that you spend most of your marketing budget and resources on generating new clients.

Right?

This is a situation that I come across a lot when speaking to all sorts of companies. I think it’s driven by how we think we should market our businesses and, in some respects, how we are educated to run and market our businesses.

Where, for example, have you seen customer retention and loyalty taught in business education programmes even the ones at top business schools? Trust me, it’s not taught at many as you would think as I have done the research.

“But”, I hear you say, “I pick up ideas about my business from business books I read”.

Well, the same situation exists in the books that are published. Here’s the results of some quick research I have just done on Amazon. If you go there and search for marketing you’ll get around 168,000 results.

If you then search for advertising you’ll get over 57,000 results.

A search for direct marketing produces 16,000 results.

However, if you search for customer retention you’ll get around 6,000 results, whilst searching for customer loyalty produces just under 14,000 results.

But, just because customer retention or customer loyalty doesn’t get a lot of attention in the education or publishing worlds does not mean that they are less important.

In fact, looking after your existing customers, I would argue, is as important if not more so than looking for new customers.

So, if the majority of your new business comes from existing clients but you spend most of your marketing budget and resources on finding new clients don’t despair as I think it presents an opportunity.

Just think how much more business or referrals you could generate if you changed some, not all, but some of the focus of your marketing budget and resources onto your existing customers.

After all, much of your marketing spend that is focused on winning new clients will be about trying to build enough trust so that that any new customer feels like trying you out. However, when you already have a relationship with your existing customers when not leverage that relationship and trust to try and do more for them or to help them introduce you to others that they know who could benefit from your help.

Who’s for taking a new look at who they focus their marketing on?

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The Questions I Would Ask If I Were Marketing Your Business – Comment and Part 1

Mar 12, ’12 10:01 AM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Marketing/PR, Small Business / SOHO, grow your business, market and sell

About a month ago I read the following post: The Questions I Would Ask If I Were Marketing Your Business on the MarketingProfs site. It’s a pretty interesting article and worth a read, particularly where it pushes for more data and real examples to be used to back up all the advice and information that gets bandied about concerning marketing most of the time.

However, there were two other things that struck me about this article:

It talks about marketing in the title but only refers to social media marketing in the post. Let’s be clear. Social media marketing is an element of the marketing tools and tactics that are available to us as businesses but it is not the whole thing.
The post spends most of its time analysing and commenting on the folks that are writing about and marketing their marketing services and less about marketing end producer/consumer businesses.

I understand that the MarketingProfs site is mainly targeted at marketing professionals but, even so, I felt that there was a disconnect between the title and the content.

But, this post is not all moan as the original post did prompt me to think about the title and what would be the questions I would ask if I were marketing someone’s or your business.

I thought about this for a while and came up with a long list of questions but then boiled them right down to two questions that will tell you everything you need to know to start with:

How much of your current business comes from existing clients and how much comes from new clients?
How much of your marketing efforts are focused on generating new clients and how much is focused on generating repeat business from your existing clients?

Answering those questions will give you a set of numbers that will help you understand quickly the marketing make-up of your business, start to identify what is working and where things can be improved to generate better results.

Do you have those numbers to hand?

In my following post(s), I’ll explore what I think those numbers can tell you about your business and what you can do with them.

Til then.

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Building Trust With Your Customer

Feb 11, ’12 3:25 PM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Business Ideas, Business Marketing, Customer Service

Recently, I read 12 Most Simple Ideas To Build Trust With Me As Your Customer, a post by Andy Hanselman on 12most.com. To read this article in its entirety, do visit 12 Most.

It did remind me of something else that I have been thinking about lately: Skepticism is rife and trust is not easily won but your people can help.

However, back to the original article. It’s a great list of 12 ideas. The two that I really like are:

5. Follow up calls to check that everything is ok!
10. Giving me the same deal as the new customers you’re trying to attract!

Why? Well, first of all I personally know about the power of the first one and have written about before in: Customer experience, bikram yoga and word of mouth marketing. Also, we all have phones in our businesses but we often the things that stops us making the calls are time (just make the time) and thoughts around ‘what if they aren’t there’ (be prepared to leave a message).

The second one just screams of fairness and value, as Andy points out in the original post. The other thing that occurs to me is that it’s really easy to do. If you’re going to do it as a promotional offer to attract new clients then it doesn’t take a lot of work to apply the same offer to existing clients too. It will also give you an opportunity to get back in touch with them. And, in doing that with an offer of a better deal, I’ve always found with clients that I have worked with that it can result in some great new business opportunities.

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Busting a few blogging myths for small businesses

Feb 4, ’12 2:59 PM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Blogging, Business Marketing, Marketing/PR

When I speak to business owners, whether to a group or one on one, about social media and, particularly, blogging, I often get a sense of unease in the room.

A lot of that is to do with people’s fears about writing, being wrong, being creative, having enough time, criticism from others etc etc.

This post aims to bust a few myths about blogging is and is not, from my perspective and was inspired by an exchange I had with another blogger on this site, Lorraine Allman, the other day on Twitter where I shared my perspective on blogging and what it is to me.

So, let’s bust a few blogging myths:

A great blogger does not need to be a trained writer. Like Seth Godin says in Talker’s block write like you talk. Everyone has something to say.
Blogging is like a muscle. You have to train yourself to get better. However, with practice you do get better.
When you blog, you don’t have to be right.
Blogging is about sharing your opinion, your analysis, your perspective.
Blogging lets people know what you stand for, should be part of your branding efforts. In a world, where many of us are looking for a more personal approach to doing business with a company or a person this is a great way for you, your personality and your thoughts to reach beyond you needing to be there.
A blog post doesn’t need to be long. In fact, some of the best blog posts I have ever seen are short.
A blog post doesn’t need to be written. It could be a video or a sketch or a photo or an audio recording (podcast) or a slideshow or……

Shall we blog?

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Some bad customer feedback can make your good customer feedback shine even brighter

Jan 28, ’12 11:59 AM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Small Business / SOHO

In a recent article from Econsultancy: Bad reviews improve conversion by 67%, which referred to a study undertaken by Reevoo (a provider of impartial product reviews, ratings and price comparison) called Bad Reviews are Good for Business, they found that “68% of consumers trust reviews more when they see both good and bad scores” and if customers don’t see ‘poor’ reviews “30% suspect censorship or faked reviews”. To add extra power to this, when prospective customers actually read bad reviews they 67% more likely to convert into a real customer than the average prospect.

How does this work? Well, if we think about it from the customers perspective it’s all to do with thinking about what could go wrong and minimising risk, something I wrote about in my last post: Sometimes great customer service only needs to be easy and familiar.

So, why given this compelling data, do not more companies look for and publish bad reviews or feedback?

From my perspective, I think it is because not many people like criticism and most people are afraid of it, especially if it is emotionally charged and not necessarily constructive. However, if you are brave enough to look for it and really listen to it then it can offer perspective and incredible insight into how you, we, our businesses have not met expectations and where we can improve.

It was Alexander Pope that said:

“To err is human; to forgive, divine.”

Therefore, bad reviews can be signs that we are human but it can also give us the opportunity to show how we respond in the event something does go wrong.

For me, that’s one of the most important opportunities that we have in life and in business.

I think that we must accept that we will make mistakes. But, the most important thing is how we respond to those mistakes to fix them. Check out: Wow! Customer Service: How to lose or win a client for life in 3 easy steps for two contrasting responses to responding to a bad experience/review.

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Sometimes great customer service only needs to be easy and familiar

Jan 22, ’12 4:41 PM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Customer Service, do customer service

We’ve all seen the news lately and heard of lots of large and small businesses closing down. No doubt, you’ve also seen the impact on your high street with both large and smaller, independent retailers shutting up shop.

However, it’s important to realise that despite uncertainty in the economic environment, high levels of competition and increasingly value and price conscious customers, there is demand and opportunity out there for businesses that provide good value products and services combined with great customer service.

This is backed up by research from the Institute of Customer Service which states that:

Two thirds of retailers consider ‘customer switching’ as a significant threat to their future sales whilst a third consider this customer behaviour as the biggest single threat to their business.
However, three quarters of the businesses surveyed believe that the delivery of good customer service is an essential differentiator in the current economic environment.
This is echoed by 83 percent of customers surveyed who said that the quality of service that they receive is very important to them when it comes to retaining their loyalty as a customer.

That doesn’t mean that you have to offer the lowest prices and the best service to succeed. It is important to point out that whilst customers are looking for competitive prices many are not willing to sacrifice service over price. I wrote about this on my blog a while ago where I talked about an article on mycustomer.com, where Right Now CEO Greg Gianforte quoted an interesting poll from Harris Interactive:

“According to their research, some 84% of customers would be prepared to pay 5% over the standard rate for a superior customer experience, 62% would pay 10% more, 25% would pay 15% more and 11% would pay 25% more.”

What I am not saying is that we all should put our prices up (although for some businesses that can be a great growth strategy). What I am saying is that when we develop our customer service we must understand what is right and best for our customers.

Customer service should not always be about making things fancy or delightful as that’s not what everyone wants and sometimes it’s just not appropriate. Sometimes customer service should about making things easy or familiar.

Why easy? Well, we are all busy so making something easy and quick and saving them time and hassle can be the best gift we can give to someone. Would you value that? I would.

What about familiarity? Where’s the value in that? As customers we are people too. So, why do we like familiarity? Because it’s understood. It feels less risky. Would you value that? I would.

In the end, for some businesses great customer service may only need to save us time and feel risk free, particularly with your existing customers (your most important asset).

When you are thinking about improving your customer service in your business are you over thinking and complicating it?

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