I always chuckle to myself when big companies that sponsor awards to start up and existing small business give, as part of the prize, mentoring or advice from a senior executive in their company. Perhaps it is no laughing matter.

Firstly, it’s arrogant to assume that starting and running a micro enterprise is so easy that someone without any experience of doing it, just because they’re a top corporate executive, can offer useful help. Start ups and micro enterprises are not boiled down versions of corporates!

Secondly, because the fledgling micro business owner doesn’t know what is good and what is bad support they could implement something that turns out to be the kiss of death to their business.

A colleague, Robert Craven, has just written a blog describing how a potential start up lost their redundancy money to unscrupulous ‘support’ providers. How were they to know that they were being conned? One of the reasons we founded the Enterprise Rockers movement is that we felt that a massive community, ‘the power of plenty’, of micro business owners could be self sufficient and we could sort out the wheat from the chaff.

It is important that we do sort out what’s good and valuable from the vultures and the ‘well intentioned but dangerous’. The right micro business to micro business support will lead to 80% of start ups surviving over 3 years with 6% becoming substantial, employing businesses. Essential enterprise skills and know how make all the difference to success. So, it is worth seeking help.

We should encourage prospective and existing business owners to continue to learn and to continue to seek support.

We never know all about enterprise

Twenty four years ago when my business partner, Clare Francis, and I were nearly two years into our business we learned something that saved us from the scrap heap. It was incredibly simple and it was learned by watching videos of our influencing, selling and presenting.

Not only was our product and service offer usually wrong we were often presenting offers without having really found out what our potential clients wanted. Frankly we were desperate to make a sale and no-one wants to buy from people as desperate as we were. We weren’t unskilled. We’d both done postgraduate business courses and we’d both been at Director level in UK subsidiaries of American multinationals. We’d been superbly trained but not on how to start and succeed in our own business.

What I learned this week-end

This week-end I was at the FSB Annual Conference in Scarborough. On top of my membership fee I paid another £100 to participate in the events during the day. My prediction is that these two days were worth thousands of pounds to me in future earnings and hundreds of hours saved of wasted effort.

The three things I learned were:

1. How to improve my use of Linked In so that I can influence someone I wish to make contact with to speak to me. I learned this from the brilliant presentation of Andy Lopata.

2. How it may be worth resetting your goals in a different way if you get stuck in a rut and are not improving your performance. I learned this from the inspirational Roger Black, former Olympic silver medallist, who got silver by focussing on running his perfect race rather than seeking to beat his competitors.

3. This third one is a bit of a cheat because I didn’t learn this at the Conference. On the Saturday lunchtime, co-founder of Enterprise Rockers, Tina Boden, and I met the supremely wise, Andy Peers. Andy is one of the foremost experts in setting up and running social enterprises. I’m certain that everything he advised Tina and I to do will mean we do get over 500,000 micro business owners in our Enterprise Rockers movement. We will make Britain a fairer and better place for micro enterprise.

So, maybe we ‘get the Enterprise T shirt’ for having started and run our own business, but we never truly have fully earned it. That’s because we must keep learning from others and seeking the right kind of support in order to survive and thrive. .

It’s motivating and good fun too. Keep learning.

———- ENDS ———-

However, one of the things that I find when I talk to business owners is that they are often confused about what sort of activity they should be getting involved in in online and social channels. As a result, they often get caught up in how they can maximise their number of fans or followers. But, more fans and followers don’t necessarily mean greater word of mouth or more sales and greater profitability.

Let’s be clear. Sharing is not new. People have been sharing great companies, cool stuff, tips or deals with their friends and family since time began. However, what is new is that it’s getting a whole lot easier to do so. So, as a business, to tap into the sharing potential that surrounds your business and to get the most out of sharing, word of mouth and recommendation for your business it is becoming increasingly important to not just understand and engage your customers but also those people that are finding and sharing your business with their friends and contacts in the online world.

A recent study of US and UK consumers by the folks at Beyond looked into this very issue. Here’s some of the things that they found out:

• Over 65% of sharers, share because they think it will be relevant or helpful to their friends
• There are 7 different types of sharer in the UK
• Before embarking on any new social marketing activity it is important that the business understand their customers journey
• Different online channels exert different levels of influence depending on the level of risk (involvement) on the part of the customer. For example, when researching a high risk (involvement) purchase like a car, customers are more likely to look to and be influenced by review sites, search engine results and the business’ own website rather than other online channels.
• When it comes to sharing, email is still king

You can learn more by checking out the full study here or take a take a look at the infographic that they produced here.

]]> http://sme-blog.com/how-to/market-and-sell/get-more-customers-by-understanding-your-sharers/feed 0 http://sme-blog.com/small-business/building-a-brand-spell-it-out?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=building-a-brand-spell-it-out http://sme-blog.com/small-business/building-a-brand-spell-it-out#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 05:51:02 +0000 Lorraine Allman http://sme-blog.com/?p=9035 I wanted to share a quick way to help you remember some of the essential elements of building your business brand through the acronym – yes, you’ve guessed it – BRAND.

I know there are many other elements to building a brand and plenty of ways to do this on a budget too (that’s for a later post) but these basic elements should keep you going for now.

Build and inspire loyalty and affinity with everyone (customers, suppliers, investors)

Recognise and develop your personal brand (people buy from people)

Authenticity is key – be yourself and let that shine through in your business

Network at every opportunity

Distinguish your offering from your competitors

A few deep breaths later I remembered the basic rules of writing a press release and got to work. The leader of the initiative was delighted with the result and with a bit of tweaking here and there it was ready to go.  Two weeks later with the main contents of the release included in a high profile blog it has been read in excess of 3000 times with over150 shares on Linked In and hundreds of Twitter tweets.

If you’re thinking of writing a press release for your business and wondering where to start, here are some of my top tips. Concentrate on getting the main body of the release written before worrying about a catchy headline:

• Do your research and gather relevant, factual information to include either in the main body of the press release or at the end
• Indicate whether it’s for immediate release or embargoed until [date]
• Follow the who, what, where, when, and why structure for the story
• Include quotes from yourself and/or relevant others
• Include contact details at the end
• Include links to relevant information for journalists to verify
• Add in a photograph (of you or whatever you’re promoting if relevant)

Make it Newsworthy – read the release back again and ask yourself (better still ask someone-else) whether it’s a newsworthy story. Remember you are competing against hundreds and thousands of other businesses to get your release in that media so it has to be something that’s of interest to the majority of readers, relevant, and a maybe a little different.

Now you’ve written the release it’s time to think about a Headline. It does help if you can create an attention grabbing headline but be careful to keep it relevant to the content. Journalists will often tweak it anyway and devise their own headline if they like the story enough.

Take a mixed media approach to your press releases. There are plenty of web sites where your release can be submitted (mine was sent to journalism.co.uk) but don’t rely on this exclusively for your story to be picked up. Look at other offline options such as local newspapers, and magazines but make sure if you’re going local that there is a clear local angle in your message. Don’t forget to use social media e.g. Twitter, Linked In to promote it and ask followers/networks to send it to their journalist contacts. You could also try to get it included in a high-profile blog like we did.

Think carefully about the timing when you send a press release – if it lands on desks the busiest day of the week it’s unlikely to get noticed, so try to find out when deadline day is (especially for local media) and avoid it!

The more you practice writing press releases the better you’ll become. Don’t be afraid to keep sending them in, there’s no guarantee the first, second, or even third one will be published but if it’s a quiet news day you could be lucky and the fact you’ve persistently tried to get their attention means they are more likely to remember it. Good luck!

If you’re interested in the press release I wrote, you can view it here. If you believe #microbizmatters do feel free to sign the e-petition too!

If we think about how we buy and research things, this is never more important than on the internet where great content in the form of blogs, articles, testimonials, newsletters, case studies, success stories and lessons learnt stories etc can be great ways to build credibility with your customers current and potential.

This is also backed up by data and research, which according to Marketo, 93% of B2B buyers use search to begin their buying process (http://bit.ly/9O6pix).

Going back to the workshop, the clients that I was working agreed with this but then started to voice concerns about the content creation process with statements like:
•    What do we have to say?
•    I’m not a great fan of writing
•    How much can we say about our industry?
•    etc
•    etc

These are common issues that I hear from many companies that are not used to creating new content for their marketing.

However, here’s the key to all of this: Your marketing does not always have to be about you.

Telling stories about your clients’ successes, interviewing people that your clients would find interesting, sharing and commenting on articles or resources that your clients would find useful……all of these ideas and others are not about you but about other people.

Also, the key is also not to think one-dimensionally about content. For example, if you are going to interview someone that you find interesting and think your clients would to then video it. Why? Well, because you can upload a video, strip out the audio to create a podcast or transcribe the interview to create the content for a newsletter or blog post.

For me, the trick is not to think that one piece of content can only be served or used in one way and at one time. What we must remember is that we are all different and consume our information in different ways according to our own preferences and how we best learn. We also need to remember that assuming that old content will get found is a big assumption. So, refreshing and redistributing your old content from time to time is really helpful for you and can also be really helpful for your customers current and potential.

So, if you are thinking about creating content to help with your marketing (and you should be) then think about these 4 words: Create, repurpose, recycle and curate.

Do that and you’ll be off to a flying start.