Thoranna

Show up and be there! #Notthere

Today I want to share something a little bit out of the ordinary for me. See, I just got back from beautiful Boston where I attended the most awesome conference ever, #Inbound15, hosted by HubSpot. It was in one word MINDBLOWING! It is a conference about inbound marketing (aka content marketing) and has a host of fabulous speakers on all kinds of things marketing related, as well as some inspiring and motivational keynotes. Anyway, I want to share something with you from Inbound:

So, marketing related blog posts are not out of the ordinary for me, but this one isn’t strictly speaking marketing related. However, it is important, not just for us as people, but for us as marketers and business people. At Inbound, one of the keynotes was given by someone I pretty much only remember as the daughter in the White House when I was younger. Not being in the US, I must admit I didn’t really know what an amazing and inspiring woman Chelse Clinton has grown up to be, and the fantastic work she is doing. In her keynote she drew attention to worldwide data on women’s rights and her work with women and children. As an Icelandic woman, I belong to a country at the forefront of gender equality today – and yet, we still have a long way to go. So does the US, the UK, mainland Europe and the rest of the world. We must do better. We must get there! #notthere

This is not just a question of women’s rights being human rights, as Hillary Clinton said in Bejing 20 years ago, this is also a question of economics. The fact is that a world with equal rights and women’s participation in all aspects of our world is also a better world economically and a better world for business – a better world all around.

I pulled out a few things from the talk and the interview afterwards into images that can be shared on social, and I hope you do. There is a lot more to be said, and I want to encourage you to visit noceilings.org for more about the state of affairs for women in the world and what we can do. The video of the whole keynote and interview can also be seen below. [Read more…]

I HATE Boring Businesses!

There! I’ve said it! I truly, deeply, madly hate boring businesses. In my mind there is absolutely no excuse for boring businesses. Don’t get me wrong, not every business has to be outrageously funny and crazy (although, I definitely don’t mind those) – but I believe all businesses should be interesting, because boring is not antonym of fun or funny when it comes to business – it is the antonym of interesting. Why on earth should we do business with those who are not interesting? If you don’t have something of interest to contribute in this world, why should I give a damn? If you don’t make the world better in some way or another, why exist? Businesses that are interesting are worth caring about. Those that can’t be bothered – well, why should we bother with them?

Why?

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Target Groups Untangled – which chapter do you want to read first?!

Hey there,

As you may be aware of (or not ;) the second book in my Marketing Untangled series, Target Groups Untangled: The Small Business & Entrepreneur’s Guide to Finding and Knowing Your Ideal Target Groups, is in the works and will be out later this year.

I was hoping that you would help me out a little bit. When it does come out, I will be giving away a free chapter of the book, and I was wondering which one you would find most interesting. If you would mark the three chapters in the list below that you would like to see, I would be most grateful.

If you would like to make sure you are notified when the book is out – to receive your free chapter and perhaps something more for your marketing ;) – please go to thoranna.is/targetgroupsuntangled and sign up for notifications.

Many thanks in advance for your help!

xo
Thoranna

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SWOT Analysis – what, why and how?

SWOT analysis has been used for decades and gives you a systematic way of analysing the market, and when combined with other analysis tools such as PESTLE (see below), can be a great way to reduce the risk of missing something important. There are just so many things out there that it’s easy to miss crucial things if you are not careful. So what the heck is SWOT Analysis? Why should you do it? And how on earth do you do it? Let me tell you how – it’s actually quite fun ;)

What Is SWOT Analysis?

SWOT analysis is an evaluation tool. It can be used to evaluate a business venture or other kind of project, and lately SWOT is being applied in various other situations, such as personal development. For our intents and purposes, we can use it to evaluate our business, our products and/or services and the marketing of our business, products or services.

The analysis has four parts (S – W – O – T) which examine internal and external factors and their potential influence on the project in question. Let’s look at them in turn:

S = Strengths

W = Weaknesses

This refers to strengths and weaknesses within the business or project team. These are internal things – the sort of things that are up to us. If the project is marketing, we may have strengths such as a good knowledge of SEO or a great graphic designer on board, but we can also have weaknesses, such as a limited budget or lack of knowledge of Facebook advertising (if that is something that matters to our marketing). These need to be things that don’t apply to other players in our market. If all of them are great at SEO and can afford to hire a great graphic designer, then it’s not a strength of ours. If the other players in the market also have a limited budget and don’t know how to do Facebook advertising, then it is not a particular weakness of ours – it’s actually a potential opportunity to get ahead of them.

O = Opportunities

T = Threats

Opportunities and Threats refer to things in the outside environment that may impact our project and we can essentially not do anything about as such. We can only react and adapt, but not change the facts. These can be things like the weather, the economy, demographic developments and such and they can be good for us (hence providing opportunities) or bad (hence threats).

Why Do SWOT Analysis?

It’s really quite simple. You want to be aware of your strengths, so that you can best use them in your business; your weaknesses, so that you can find a way to improve upon them and neutralise their impact; the opportunities in the marketplace so that you can take advantage of them and the threats out there, so that you can be prepared and minimise their negative impact on your business.

How Do I Do SWOT Analysis?

Go through [Read more…]

Marketing Your Product or Service by Putting Lipstick on a Pig

Recently I did a talk for a lovely group of people. One of the things that came up in our discussions was how marketing is not just for business. There are so many other things that need marketing, because marketing is about fulfilling people’s needs and solving their problems and about communicating to them how you can do that. Hence, most things can benefit from marketing thinking and methods. Here are a few examples:

Schools can use marketing to attract students – and teachers – believe me, Ivy league schools don’t get the best students and teachers “just because”
Hobby clubs can use marketing to attract members
Sports clubs can use marketing to attract better players, or attract an audience (paying or not), or attract better (volunteer) coaches
People can use marketing to raise awareness for social causes
Public services can use marketing to create awareness and educate users
Government organisations can use marketing to raise awareness of their services, improve their image, or educate their users so that things run smoother
Activist groups can use marketing to spread their ideology and recruit fighters for the cause
Individuals can use marketing to get their dream job
Individuals can use marketing to get their dream partner ;)

The list can go on and on and on… I actually challenge you to give me an example of something that you think could not benefit from marketing thinking and methods ;)

Nobody Wants to Kiss a Pig!

However, at this talk, a gentleman asked me about their particular club, and whether it could be marketed to not only get more members, but to get younger members, as the membership group is getting older. I promptly answered that yes, that would of course be possible. And it is. What I did not say at the time, as it was not appropriate, was that [Read more…]