branding Archives - Page 7 of 7

What happens in an hour?

what happens in an hour - thoranna.is

One hour. 60 minutes. 3600 seconds. That’s one session at the gym. That is one TV show (with loads of ads). That’s one massage session – and not nearly enough! You can’t really do that much in an hour. Do you sell your time? Whether as a consultant, trainer, masseuse, teacher or whatever. Does it all work out? Do you buy an hour from someone? How much do you get out of that hour?

For a long time people have sold their time. When you get paid overtime you are getting paid by the hour. You get an x amount for your usual hours and y per hour above and beyond that. And if you have an employment contract with your company, that works. But if you are freelance, you need to sell quite a few hours and you have to sell them for a fair amount – and still have time to market yourself, keep your books etc. If you take a holiday, if you get sick, you don’t get paid. Summers tend to quiet down and so does the holiday period … if you trade hours for dollars you know what I am talking about.

How can you make more of your time? How can you take what you do, wrap it up and sell it more as a product rather than time. How can you continue to sell even though you take a holiday or come down with the flu? Can you teach people something related to what you do, write a book, create an online course, a DVD course or even an audio book? Can you sell other things related to what you do? A gardener could do a DVD course about yard maintenance, a masseuse could write a book about how to keep your muscles supple and how to relax, an arthritis specialist could publish a book with advice for arthritis sufferers and a personal trainer can sell training videos online. There are various ways to wrap up what you do and sell it – how can you make your service or knowledge into a package that can be sold?

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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…]

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…]

Content Marketing: Don‘t Build Things On Sand

Content marketing can be a very very strong marketing tactic for smaller businesses. It does require time and effort, but not necessarily that much cold hard cash – sometimes no cash at all. What it does require however is that you have already laid a solid foundation.

If you don’t know who you want to appeal to and if you don’t know your viewers or readers, how are you going to make content that appeals to them? How will you know where best to share it with them? How will you know what kind of content they want to see? – do they like text, video, images etc?

Also, you don’t want to only talk about what it is you do, you need to have room to talk about other things that your target group is interested in – otherwise you are just like that annoying guy at the party who can never talk about anything but himself and what he is interested in.

Therefore it is extremely important that you know your target group or groups and know and understand them very well. Oh, and if you have a number of target groups, you need to know what different things appeal to each of them, and how best to deliver the content so that it is effective, but also to make sure that content meant for one group does not negatively affect another group should they come across it. You need to be clear on all of these things for your content to be effective.

You also need to know who you want to be, what you want them to think of you, what feelings you want to evoke with them through your content. Your content is an extremely strong brand builder – but if you don’t know what you want your brand to be then your content can not be effective in building that brand. It can even do more harm than good by muddling your image and causing people to be confused about who you are and what you do. That will never work.

If your content is not consistent, if it does not convey the same overall message and brand, it will never be very effective – and we don’t have the time or the resources to be doing things that are not working as hard for us as we are doing ourselves.

We also need to realise how our content works within the marketing process. Content has a different purpose based on where in the marketing process we are using it. Do you want it to grab people’s attention? Arouse their interest? Get them to like you? Trust you? Give them a taste of what it is you have to offer? Clinch the sale? Get repeat business? Or help referrals?

That’s why I keep hammering on about the foundations, the strategy, because if your strategy is well thought out and planned, that will be your rock to build on and everything else you do in your marketing will be so so much more effective. If you build your actions on sand they will just blow away in the wind ;)