Thoranna

Blah blah bla bites, blah RAM, blah blah MHz blah… – Talk Like A Human!

What do you mean you don’t get it? Really?! There are actually a lot of people out there who think a lot of other people get it and can’t understand why there are not lots of people lining up to buy from them! :)

A few local IT companies have approached me about their marketing. These are smaller players in the market, offer various IT services and often also sell hardware. Most of these don’t sell a lot to IT specialists. Their main customers are individuals and small and medium sized businesses who don’t have an IT person, or if they have one, they are general IT managers who have a good overview of things, rather than specialists in anything.

The thing about these IT companies is that they are all pretty much the same – well, at least the ones I have checked out. They don’t set themselves apart in any way, and none of them talk like humans about what they can do for their customers. They all seem to get lost in techie jargon. Because they are all the same, and because they all speak tech jibberish, people don’t really care where they buy things. They will buy based on price and the whole market therefore competes on prices – and if people buy because of good service, it is more often than not because they were lucky enough to be serviced by Steve or Johnny or someone who is naturally good at customer service, rather than it being because of the company’s focus on customer service.

There are huge opportunities for differentiation in this market. Speaking [Read more…]

Are You Burning Inside?

Most of us don’t decide to live an empty life. Most of us do not want to do work that we are not interested in. Most of us don’t decide to go into business just because… Heck, those that have tried it know that you don’t go into business just for fun – it is a lot of work, unpaid for a long time and feels a bit like being back at university – you never really have any time off because you could always be doing something (and always feel like you should be doing something). You don’t go into business unless there is a fire in your belly. Unless it is what you really want to do. It’s a bit like acting. After three years at drama school and a few years in the “biz” I realised I simply did not want to be an actor – and believe me, that is not a business you’re in unless it is the only thing you can imagine doing!

I remember meeting with young and talented designers with a very exciting project. We discussed [Read more…]

Be a Peacock!

Most, if not all, of us have at some point or another known the feeling of rationally knowing something, but then at some point having it really hit home. Get it. Understand it fully and take it to heart. This happened to me in the past few days. Despite constantly reminding my clients and you, my dear reader, to be brave, to be different, to stand out from the crowd, encourage you to matter and mean something to someone, I realised that I myself have been hiding. I have been hiding a part of me as it if were the most terrible secret…

We get so preoccupied with giving the customer what they want that we forget to show our inner selves. We stop being people and start being just a business. A business without a face, formal and professional. We are told that we must meet our customer’s needs, the customer is always right, and that we need to listen to the customer and give them what they want. Which is all true … but as soon as this means sacrificing being ourselves, being the people and the business we really are, and start trying to be something else, we are paying too dearly for their custom. And professionalism does not mean we should not be human. [Read more…]

Don’t be afraid to narrow it down…

This is classic marketing and I have talked about this before. Find your target group, the one that is most likely to buy from you, and market to that group. Don’t try to be everything to everybody. Find your dream customer and find more of those.

However, I never said it was easy. And it can be scary. You are always aware that you could be losing out on someone who may, perhaps, in theory, possibly buy. We all do it. I do it myself. I constantly have to remind myself that I have to choose and narrow it down further – not try to be everything to everybody.

Until now I have defined my target group as small and medium business that do not have a marketing specialist on board but need to, and want to, improve their marketing. Great. But boy, that is still wide open! So I am constantly thinking about this, considering things, talking to people and finetuning.

I have considered narrowing down to SMBs in certain industries, e.g. hotel marketing from A to Z, marketing for accountants from A to Z or marketing for designers from A to Z. [Read more…]

What Is Your Yellow Brick Road?

When running a small business, there is always a tendency to be and do everything for everyone. Particularly in the first few years while establishing the business and getting the cashflow going. This makes it extremely important to keep focused.

In order to keep focused, however, you first need to know exactly what kind of business you want to be. You need to know exactly what you do and, which is no less important, what you don’t do. You must believe and trust that you are doing the right thing, stay on the yellow brick road, and have enormous passion for what you do, because otherwise you will simply give up. Of course you keep changing, learning, developing and finding better and better ways of doing things, but that is different from chasing the idea of the week in this direction one day and that direction the next.

I am all too familiar with this myself. I started out with the goal of [Read more…]