As a marketing coach, I’ve probably heard every excuse in the book why people can’t market their businesses. You wouldn’t believe some of the whoppers people tell when they’re trying to justify their failure to attract clients.
Now don’t get me wrong; it’s not that failing to attract clients makes one a bad person. Not at all. It’s just that when I hear the following excuses I feel compelled to call ‘em as I see ‘em: Baloney!
If you have the mistaken notion that any of these lame excuses are the reason that your business isn’t successful, get a clue. These are just EXCUSES for people who fail, not reasons not to succeed (a subtle, yet important, difference).
1. “I’m too honest to market.” OK, this little gem is at the top of my list because it is both a lie AND an insult! I am a marketer by trade, and I am honest, so I know for a fact that marketing is not a dishonest process or practice, nor does it have to be dishonest to be effective. What’s dishonest is when you overstate your results, or if you truly don’t believe that your product or service is worth what you charge, or if you deliberately intend to defraud people. In that case, the problem is with you, not marketing, so stop insulting the rest of us.
2. “I’m too modest to market myself.” Listen up, princess, every word out of your mouth doesn’t have to be about YOU. Think about what your clients want, need and actually get, and that’ll keep the conversation going for as long as you need it to go. Hey, if you’re not comfortable saying great things about yourself, start saying great things about what your clients get out of working with you. Or better yet, let them say it for you in the form of testimonials. But don’t think that you have to be the subject of every fascinating conversation you have with prospects.
3. “I’m too shy to market myself.” As a highly sensitive person myself, you’d think I’d have more sympathy for this excuse, but I don’t. If you want to be successful, know right now that it may not always be comfortable, and you have to be willing to do what it takes to succeed, even if that means going outside your comfort zone. Shyness is a habit that can be overcome with practice, so join Toastmasters, or see a therapist if that’s what it is going to take, but get over yourself. I promise you will be glad you did.
4. “I’m too creative to market myself.” This excuse is really lame! Marketing is a very creative process, and since you have literally thousands of options when structuring your marketing plans, creativity is an asset, not a liability. Unless you’re one of those I-am-a-self-indulgent-whiner-who-refuses-to-accept-any-responsibility-for-my-actions-and-masks-that-character-flaw-with-claims-of-misunderstood-or-excessive-creativity kinds of people, in which case I say, grow up, and while you’re at it, think up a more creative excuse.
5. “I don’t have enough time to market my business.” OK, this excuse sounds good at first, but in reality it doesn’t wash. Either you are already marketing but not acknowledging your marketing activities as such, or your business is so busy that you don’t need to market at all, which makes this excuse unnecessary. So if you haven’t got all the business you want but you don’t have time to market, you need to reevaluate how you’re spending your time, and make some tough decisions about when you are going to do what you need to do to get those clients.
6. “I don’t have enough money to market my business.” Again, you get points for trying, but this is still just an excuse, because good marketing isn’t about money, it’s about relationships. You can start very modestly with your marketing plans, and spend nothing but your time. And let me tell you, if you can’t get some traction spending 40 hours a week trying to build your business relationships, maybe you should rethink your decision to be an entrepreneur.
7. “I have no personal network to market to.” Oh please, you’ve got to have a better excuse than this! If you truly have no family, no friends, no colleagues, no acquaintances or no former co-workers, then start meeting some. I don’t care if you’ve been on a desert island for the past 20 years, you can always meet people through networking meetings, trade associations, classes, social clubs, or at the gym! Just pick up the phone and call the people you want to know, get out there and mingle, and your personal network will grow quickly.
8. “My product or service is too hard to explain to people.” Fine. Quit explaining what you do, and start talking about what your customers GET from working with you. Do you help your customers get thinner, smarter, married, fitter, their first home, or what? Seriously, nobody cares about what you do, really; people care about what they get. Get it?
9. “My product or service is so good that it should sell itself.” Sure, that’s probably true if your product is a talking monkey, or your clients are all telepaths, but other than that, it’s going to take a little effort on your part, bucko, so start creating some momentum in the marketplace and you’ll find that your product needs less and less of your efforts to sell, until one day it almost seems like it DOES sell itself!
10. “My niche is too narrow and I can’t find my customers.” Hogwash. What this usually means is that you haven’t yet defined your customer, because you can’t find what you haven’t identified (and don’t give me that you’ll-know-them-when-you-see-them line). Start with a matrix of situation and need to identify that client. For example, let’s say you’re a financial planner, and you think your clients are “people who want to get their financial affairs in order.” Think instead about who needs to get their financial affairs in order, and you’ll probably come up with something like “married couples with children who have $X in assets and need to protect those assets with planning.” And you can certainly find those people, can’t you?
So we’ve blasted all these lousy excuses, but we haven’t yet addressed the biggest excuse of all: fear. Most of the time I’ve found that the more excuses my clients offer for not moving forward with their businesses, the more fearful they are.
Hey, I understand, and I’ve been there myself. But what it comes down to is this: Are you more afraid of succeeding (or failing) than you are of going back to work for that idiot boss you always end up working for? If the answer is that you’re more afraid of facing the personal responsibility of entrepreneurship than of any garbage your boss could throw at you, then good-bye entrepreneur, and hello wage-slave.
But if you think that the worst possible scenario is working for some moron again, and that you’ll happily work like a dog if that’s what it takes just so you don’t have to slink back into that stinking office with your tail between your legs, good for you. It’s time to forget about excuses, and start figuring out how to make this whole self-employed thing work for you.
The first thing to understand is that fear is OK. Yes, we’ve all been fearful (and yes, I include myself in that “we” statement). It can be scary picking up the phone. It can be scary going to a sales meeting.
But at the end of the day, isn’t your product or service of value to someone? Aren’t people glad (or going to be glad) that you’ve solved a problem for them? So stop worrying and fearing the marketing process, and remember this: Marketing is really nothing more than the process of developing relationships, and you, my friend, can do that in your sleep.
Veronika (Ronnie) Noize, the Marketing Coach, is a successful Vancouver, WA-based entrepreneur, author, speaker, and Certified Professional Coach. Through coaching, classes and workshops, Ronnie helps small businesses attract more clients. For free marketing resources including articles and valuable marketing tools, visit her web site at http://www.sohomarketingguru.com/
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Excuses, marketing
If you’ve been involved in marketing during the past decade, you’ve probably noticed that things are a bit different since this whole ‘online’ thing got underway.
While being online has starting to become an ‘ordinary’ part of many people’s day-to-day lives, the experience of being online is very different from any other type of popular media.
Those of us over the age of twenty clearly remember a world without the ‘Internet’. Back in those olden days most media consisted of marketing channels to which the majority of the population flocked. In exchange for giving people access to this content, advertisers were given access to the people who came to visit. They tossed their messages in front of us as we wandered around hoping that something would catch our eye. Sometimes it did. Mostly it didn’t.
Because these mass marketing models were based on ‘quantity’ and not ‘quality’ of consumers, there was an up-front expectation that there would be a tremendous amount of waste. Advertisers understood that even if they were targeting the very best demographic group for an offer the vast majority wouldn’t even see or respond to the marketing offer.
For marketers, it was the safety in numbers advertising approach that kept them going.
This approach also trained us, as consumers, to understand that our direct involvement in the marketing process wasn’t really necessary. The TV commercials would continue to run whether we watched them or not; the print ads would stay right where they were printed even if we didn’t open the magazine or newspaper; the ad on the side of the bus would keep moving down Main Street would keep going even if we ignored it.
But the arrival of the online world started to change things and pretty dramatically. Consumers now have millions of “channels” to choose from and advertisers have fewer places where they will reach mass markets. In fact, the very structure of the Internet means that consumers don’t even need to look at or interact with advertising anymore…unless they really want to.
Culturally we’ve developed a number of ways to share information with one another. We’ve also learned how to customize messages so that they reach specific people. We never pick up the phone and think ‘Okay, I need to talk to every person on Earth. What’s the number?’ We don’t send an email to everybody in the company every time we have a thought to share with Sandy in accounting.
When we start any new marketing campaign we need to first think about who the campaign is trying to reach. What is the ultimate goal? What is the campaign saying? What obstacles can get in the way of the right consumer receiving the message? What should the consumer do to take advantage of the offer?
In the past mass marketing has represented the ultimate delivery mechanism for advertising messages but paints the audience with such a broad brush that its goal of reaching the right people can’t be efficiently kept. To be truly effective, a delivery system has to reach the greatest number of individual consumers who can take action on the message being sent.
The bottom line is that a message that reaches 1,000,000 of the wrong people isn’t more effective than a message that reaches a single right person.
The ultimate goal of effective advertising is to maximize effectiveness while reducing waste. Correctly targeting a campaign means first identifying who the best people to receive a particular offer are and how to go about identifying where they are.
When we target online audiences that are three primary areas of exploration:
1. Contextual targeting
2. Database targeting
3. Behavioral targeting
Let’s take a closer look at the differences between these three areas.
Contextual Targeting
The simple definition for contextual targeting is the placement of messages where the people most likely to be interested are most likely to see it. Contextual targeting is perhaps the oldest type of targeted marketing. For years, trade magazines, area newspapers, local television stations and local radio stations have served as channels for contextual marketing campaigns.
Because each channel caters to a specific range of the population either based on topic interest or region, advertising using contextual targeting has generally meant reaching an audience that has already been ‘filtered’ down to a common interest or locale.
In online marketing, contextual marketing works in a similar way. Many web sites focus on, or have sections that focus on a single or limited range of topics. Like trade publications, these sites attract a self-selected audience who share a common interest whether its butterfly collecting, paintball battlefield strategies or exploring the validity of UFO sightings. For advertisers looking to communicate with these specific groups, good targeting is as easy as placing topically relevant ads on those pages.
Demographic Targeting
Demography covers a broad range of ways a population can be sliced up to define certain segments. A few of the more traditional segments include:
? Age/ Lifecycle
? Gender
? Race/Ethnicity
? Socioeconomic status
? Location of residence
? Religion
? Nationality
? Occupation
? Education level
? Family size
? Marital status
? Ownership (of home, boat, car, etc.)
? Language
While many of these characteristics can effectively narrow a population down into an audience, traditional demography often offers just a generalized benchmark of behavior.
For example, I currently live in a fairly rural part of the country. While I share a number of demographic characteristics with other people within my particular zip code (middle aged, white, own my own home, went to college, married, speak English, or a variant thereof) those benchmarks do a lousy job at identifying us as a whole or me as an individual. My little town runs the gamut of religious and spiritual beliefs, political leanings, socioeconomic levels, education and what’s considered a fun way to spend a Saturday evening. In short, we share very few characteristics as a population apart from our choice to live in the same part of the country.
For marketers trying to reach ‘us’ based solely on where we live, the results of any geographically targeted campaign are going to be just about as untargeted as you can get.
To reach a more refined group of people based on attributes that aren’t as generalized as most demographic groups, marketers need to find ways to measure ‘who’ consumers are instead of ‘what’ they are.
Here are a few more recent targeting approaches that marketers are using to reach highly refined audiences.
Psychographic Targeting
For marketers to effectively target any audience they need to have a clear understanding of the personal interests that the target audience shares. Social scientists categorize this segmentation as the study of psychographics. Psychographics are commonly defined as individual attributes directly relating to personality, values, interests or lifestyles. There are sometimes referred to as IOA variables or characteristics (for Interests, Attitudes and Opinions). Psychographics often target the most personal parts of who we are.
We belong to multiple psychographic ‘groups’ based on our interests as individuals. Our relationship with each group ranges from little involvement to whole involvement. For example, I may take my bicycle out for a short spin on a warm summer day. This action classifies me as a bicyclist and helps me to identify with other people who enjoy riding bicycles. However, my involvement in this group is very different from the guy who’s training for an upcoming Tour de France and spends 6 hours a day on his bicycle. My identity with bicycling is one of enjoyable weekend pastime while for the guy in training it’s almost on par with being a lifestyle. If given the opportunity to purchase bicycling paraphernalia I’m going to have a different perspective as to its value and necessity than he will.
Marketers looking to reach a thin-sliced audience need to understand common shared traits and how individuals in these groups ‘weigh’ their interests in these areas. Whether targeting deer hunters, urban dwellers, backgammon players, people of Scotch-Irish descent, unicyclists or guys who mow their lawns on Saturday morning, the value of each psychographic slice is going to depend on how the people in these segments define themselves.
Technographic Targeting
Online targeting is often restricted by technological limitations that prevent marketers from reaching consumers. For marketers to effectively reach consumers it’s often necessary to know where potential obstacles or bottlenecks exist.
Technographic targeting focuses on identifying the technological foundations that consumers are using to connect with the Web. This includes things like computer CPU speeds, Internet connection speeds, Operating Systems, browser types, browser versions, and drivers or extra software availability.
A common example of technographic targeting is measuring the online bandwidth capabilities of a visitor to a web site. For example, if, as a marketer, I wished to send a video based ad to my target audience I’m going to want to know if they can receive the ad. While broadband adoption over recent years has made this task easier, there are still millions of people worldwide who are using dial-up modems to get online. Without knowing how my target audience accesses the web, I run the risk of wasting impressions by sending ad content to people who can’t receive it.
On the other hand, by measuring the connect speed of my target audience, I can then sort that audience out into sub-groups and provide separate ad units for each group.
Technographic measuring can also tell marketers a lot about a potential customer. A high-tech company looking to introduce a new cutting edge product can effectively target prospects by measuring the operating system on the recipient’s computer. Prospects running the most recent versions of Windows or the Macintosh OS might be classified as being technologically savvy while prospects still running Windows 98 on a 7 year old PC are probably not good candidates for marketers looking to reach ‘early adopters’.
Centrographic Targeting
While geographical targeting is generally considered part of standard demography there are a few variations that fall outside of the basic geographic targeting realm. Whereas most geographic targeting focuses on regions and areas of the country and world based on their proximately to one another, centrographic targeting focuses more on population characteristics that can be associated with specific regions.
For example, every winter across the Northern United States there is a need for snow removal services. There is also a need for services like heating system maintenance, fuel delivery and sales of things like ice scrapers and snow tires. Meanwhile, in the Southwestern United States the need for these services or products each winter is very limited or non-existent. On the other hand, the hot summers in the Southwest requires air conditioning and home cooling services that are not always necessary in the North.
Centrographic targeting can also identify and isolate differences between population groups. For example, people living in a city like New York are going to have a different perceived need for products and services than people living a few hours north in rural New York might. Even staying within the boroughs of New York, the cultural diversity of different ethnic groups alone makes for dozens of unique regional markets.
Significant differences can also exist among cultural groups that share a similar language and history, or current geography. For example, Hispanic populations living in Southern California and those living in Southern Florida may share common cultural histories and ancestry but represent very unique markets based on unique regional characteristics.
While reaching those audiences requires a new layer of understanding on the parts of marketers, if used correctly the ability to reach more of the right consumers with any marketing offer is also going to result in greater effectiveness and much less waste.
Rob Graham – LearningCraft, LLC.
October 1, 2007
Maraknya pengguna ponsel Blackberry di Jakarta, membuat sebagian besar pengguna Blackberry asyik Blackberry Messenger (BBM) meski dalam kondisi menyetir sekalipun.
Baru-baru ini PT Honda Prospect Motor (HPM) mensosialisasikan pentingnya kesadaran berkendara dengan aman, melalui slogan “Nelpon Sambil Nyetir? No Way!”. Untuk mendukung kampanye tersebut. Honda juga mengembangkan aplikasi untuk pengguna Blackberry. Ketika aplikasi ini diaktifkan saat menyetir maka telpon akan secara otomatis tidak bisa menerima dan memberikan notifiasi bahwa si pengguna sedang mengemudi melalui SMS atau voicemail.
Meskipun demikian, menyetir sambil chatting atau menelpon menggunakan ponsel tetap berbahaya. Berikut tips aman berkendara meski membawa ponsel, tapi sangat tidak disarankan untuk tidak menyentuh ponsel saat berkendara:
1. Sebelum berangkat pelajarilah buku manual Ponsel dengan baik untuk mengetahui fitur-fitur yang dapat membantu Anda untuk tetap berkomunikasi tanpa harus mengalihkan pandangan saat berkendara. Fitur-fitur itu misalnya speed dial atau re-dial. Gunakan pulahands free kit untuk tetap bisa mengobrol tanpa harus melepaskan salah satu tangan dari kemudi.
2. Sedapat mungkin jangan melakukan panggilan ketika sedang mengemudi. Jika terpaksa menepilah dan berhenti sejenak atau tunggu sampai benar-benar berhenti di lampu merah.
3. Letakkan Ponsel sedemikian rupa sehingga mudah dijangkau tanpa harus mengalihkan pandangan dari jalan. Mintalah rekan Anda untuk memungut Ponsel jika berdering jika keadaan tidak memungkinkan, atau diamkan saja kalau Anda sendiri karena toh keselamatan adalah yang utama.
4. Kalau Anda terjebak dalam situasi yang berbahaya seperti hujan lebat, keadaan lalu lintas yang padat dan hal lain yang menuntut konsentrasi lebih tinggi, minta lawan bicara untuk menelepon beberapa saat lagi dan segera hentikan pembicaraan.
5. Sedapat mungkin hindari topik-topik pembicaraan yang berat. Hal ini akan semakin menempatkan keselamatan Anda dalam risiko yang amat besar karena pembicaraan yang berat akan meminta fokus pikiran lebih besar pula. Bukan hal yang mustahil juga kalau topik pembicaraan yang berat akan membuat Anda bingung, kehilangan konsentrasi atau bahkan stres. Karena itu tetaplah berhati-hati.
