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March 11, 2020 Comments

What am I?

Once you’ve identified any disconnects in your messaging (see “Do you have the stomach for a marketing audit?”) and any missing tools in your marketing toolbox (see “Are you missing key marketing pieces?”), it’s time to develop a communications strategy. We need guideposts to ensure that our messaging stays on track and is exposed to the right audiences in order to help meet your business objectives.

To do that we go back to a questioning strategy. One simple and fun technique that we’ve used successfully is to ask “If your business were an animal, what kind of animal would it be and why?” Sit with that for a minute. You may instantly see a fox running nimbly over a forest floor, smart and quick. You may see a seal gracefully thriving in waters too cold for other species. The idea of the fox or the seal may better help you visual your company’s brand and help you assess whether that brand is manifesting in your communications. Don’t limit yourself to animals – use whatever works for you. Whatever you do, can you liken it to something even more familiar? Think about how that metaphor speaks to your customer’s needs. Keep bringing it back to your client. Again, keep your ideal customer in mind. How does this speak to them?

February 7, 2020 Comments

Do you have the stomach for a marketing audit?

How do you know where you are and if what you’re doing is in alignment with what you’re trying to achieve? We recommend an audit – not a financial audit – but an audit of your current practices. And I know that some people think that they don’t have marketing practices to audit, but they do. (See “I don’t do marketing”.)

When we’re called into a prospective new client, we typically walk into a scenario in which the firm owner or company leadership see the need for better marketing and don’t know where to start – or restart – or don’t have the internal resources to sustain the effort necessary to create forward momentum. They may even have exhausted their internal team already and cracks in performance are beginning to show, either because the internal resource is crying uncle or opportunities are being missed.

A scenario we encounter less often: the company owner believes that better marketing will help her grow her business, and she’s been marketing the firm herself. She doesn’t want to invest more money in marketing, or any money in marketing, but she believes she’s willing to invest her own time in the process.

And, still, another scenario is that the company leadership does not believe that they need to improve their marketing efforts, but internal forces (sales people, business development folks) are demanding some kind of action or support.

In all of these situations, we ask the same questions in order to quickly audit the company’s marketing status. We ask questions that inform our internal judge and assessor. But first we ask them to show us or tell us what they’re currently doing to market the firm. Let’s list what we’re talking about so you know what to put out on the table in front of you.

Your company name
Your logo
Your tagline, if you have one, or often-used “brand” language
Website
Social media accounts
Advertisements
Email marketing
Letters and communication to clients and colleagues
White papers or blog posts
Etc.

All of this should be collected and put out in front of you in some way.

Now, we ask:

What do you do? What markets do you serve? Who is your ideal client or customer? Describe her workstyle, education, type of business or industry, etc.

Why does that client prefer to work with you? What makes your relationship work? As we ask these foundation business questions, we look and read the current marketing materials against the answers. Do the answers to your questions appear in your marketing materials?

Ask further: What feedback have these materials garnered? Do prospective customers respond to any of your marketing tools? How? How are you measuring the success of your marketing materials?

Right away you may be able to see where there’s accord and traction, and see where there’s a disconnect. That should begin to give you insight into your next steps.

This is something that any business can do for itself, whether you’re a solopreneur or run a fully staffed team: audit your marketing. Do this audit and be honest with yourself.

January 3, 2020 Comments

New year, same old issues?

The New Year sweeps in with lots of hype: a rose-colored-glasses look back on the last year and heaps of often-unrealistic expectations for the year ahead. If you like to have a fresh starting point once in a while, January gives you a boost. But, if January 1^st feels like just another day, dragging with it all the same issues that plagued December 31^st, how do we conjure the wherewithal to get through the winter, let alone meet our marketing and business goals?

Like most of us, I know that the New Year is both a state of mind and a calendar date. I’m not going to wake up on New Year’s Day with superhuman energy or to find that a marketing version of the shoemaker’s elves has done all my work. I can choose to see that life is chaotic and challenging, joyful and satisfying, and try not to deny any of it. That translates into planning for 2020 marketing activities, too.

Even if you only know the broadest or most general goals of your organization, you can easily identify a few promotional tools that will move you in a positive direction. Of course, that’s the [deceptively] easy part: Once you know the people you serve and understand where they get their information, meet them there with your brand, your know-how, and your compassion. The rest may seem hazy or even overwhelming; the rest is all about the how.

“Break it into pieces” may be the best advice I’ve ever heard about anything. If I make no other resolution for the new year, I vow to default to a “pieces” view when issues become too cloudy, complex, or challenging. That’s especially true for marketing.

You’ll be able to get more done and be better understood when you focus on single, well-articulated ideas. Break your bigger ideas into smaller parts. List smaller pieces of the larger initiative. Make flow charts and lists to your heart’s content, but try to narrow your energy to one piece at a time. If overhauling your company website is on the horizon for 2020, the very idea can shut you down before you start. After you segment the project into a list of to-dos or an itemized spreadsheet (we all have our preferences and organization SOPs), isolate one piece at a time. A website redesign, for example, may include steps like a content audit of the existing site (what works and what doesn’t), an audit of the host’s performance, and identifying an outside design partner to help realize your vision. That’s a lot to wade through. With the “break it into pieces” approach, confining your efforts to the content audit first (and alone) may greatly reduce the overwhelm and provide data that will help redefine other steps, potentially lightening the overall weight of the project.

Whether you’re looking at January as a month of brave new days, or seeing it as the same-old-same-old, I hope that when you break your goals into manageable bits, you’ll move mountains.

Deanne

November 5, 2019 Comments

More successful partnerships?

No surprise – communication is key.

We’ve learned and relearned a couple of things. Honest, direct and informed feedback makes for a smoother, more efficient process. A smoother process often breeds mutual respect. And, with mutual respect, all partnerships can succeed.

Here are two-and-a-half tips to help build trust, foster innovation and achieve more in any successful partnership between you and your creative team, whether they’re in-house, an outside agency, or freelance contractors.

Define.

A professional creative team will guide you through the strategy-building process, but whether you’ve hired an agency, a freelance or an independent contractor, you may want to provide your own creative brief as well. A good creative brief or communications strategy will inform and direct the work at hand. It will answer questions about the project, its audiences, its purpose, its timing and its distribution or end use. Be clear and concise with your direction. Don’t just define the project – website content, print advertising, sales education iBook, inbound marketing; be clear about what you’d like the project to do for your company. Feel free to share the successes and shortcomings of previous projects and campaigns.

Trust.

Once you’ve clearly defined your objectives, explained your company’s vision and mission, and provided information about the intended audience’s culture, let your team employ its skills and talent to create on your behalf. When each conceptual draft meets the communications strategy, or answers the creative brief, you’ll know that you’re working with folks who get it; you’ll feel more confident trusting their professional expertise. And, when their insights and ideas gain your respect, you’ll have earned their tireless involvement and steadfast commitment.

Repeat.

Clearly, communication fosters confidence. When we gather good information, ask relevant questions, define where we’re going – together – and then deliver ideas, content and designs that reflect that conversation, we’ve created one of the keystones to a provable, successful partnership. We’ve heard each other, seen evidence of understanding, and trust that it can and will happen again.

Now, that bears repeating.

To help you communicate the details of your next project, contact us by email for a communications strategy worksheet.

“Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” Helen Keller

July 9, 2019 Comments

When things slow down a bit, it can be the perfect time to finish projects that don’t get done when everyone’s busy.

That can be especially true for marketing, sales, and communications materials. One project that often slips to the bottom of the to-do pile during prime time is the hardworking case study.

Sales teams love case studies because they help prospective customers visualize the benefits of working together in a real-world example. Case studies serve as testimonials, services run-downs, and, if well-crafted, compelling advertisements that help elevate your reputation. They also provide plenty of opportunity for repurposing: launch them as blog posts; send them as emails; make them available as PDFs; print them and package them with leave-behinds and proposals; and, of course, serialize them across your social media accounts and newsfeeds. Case studies show off what your company does best.

If we’ve inspired you to create a couple new case studies for your team, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

Develop a template that reflects your brand and key objectives. Following your own style guidelines will help unify the look and feel of the case studies, fortifying your brand and core messaging.

Focus on the primary customer benefit of working with your company. Don’t shy away from the emotional impact of the project. Help readers understand why saving time was essential to your customers because with more time they could focus on improving service to their customers, for instance.

Decide which is most important: the customer industry or the bundle of services your team delivered. Direct the case study into that lane so you and your sales team can get the most use out of it. If you want to employ it with both audiences, write it two ways and create two different studies. Don’t try to accomplish both with one; you’ll muddy the intention.

Break the story into a few major categories. Answer the questions:

• What was the problem, challenge, or assignment?

• Why were you brought onto the project?

• What was your unique approach to finding a solution?

• How did the customer benefit?

• How did the customer’s customer benefit?

• What details made a substantial difference?

• Why is this case study of interest to anyone else?

Ask every contributor the same questions. If you’re getting information from different resources from inside your company, provide each with the same short questionnaire. This way, you’ll find it easier to create similarity between content flow and depth of detail.

We can help. If the timing isn’t right for you to start work on your case studies, we’ve got you covered. In short order, we can get you geared up with shiny new case studies that your team will want to use. Send us an email or give us a call.

March 13, 2019 Comments

Starting out on social media?

Starting out, we at Stone’s Throw often coach clients with smaller and medium-sized businesses to use social media initially as a way to demonstrate vitality, interest, and enthusiasm by showing activity on social media platforms. Let the world see your public face – especially if your potential customers use social media. Ensure that your posts are consistent with your brand image and messaging, and please make sure that you have a system for post approvals, monitoring, and responding.

If social media advertising will indeed add value to your marketing efforts, there are a few terms you’ll want to know:

Awareness ads: Paid social media advertising is a way to create energy and push your posts into the newsfeeds of your selected audiences. These ads are often referred to as awareness ads; they boost awareness by allowing audiences to see your ad (“impression”). Awareness advertising is often the least expensive of social media placements.

Conversion ads: To encourage your audience to take some kind of action (visit your webpage, make a phone call, complete a form, etc.), social media ads have to work harder and typically cost more. They require the user to move from a passive audience member to someone who takes some kind of action. This is often referred to as conversion.

Engagement rate: Most social media platforms use metrics to describe the types of interaction your posts generate. Engagement rate refers to the number of likes, shares, and comments your posted content receives.

Hashtag: You can supercharge your posted content by tagging keywords with a hashtag (#) – what some of us used to call a pound sign. When a # precedes a word or phrase (without any word spaces), the social media platform sees the phrase as a searchable keyword. This can be especially helpful when looking for people talking about a particular marketing issue online. #smallbizmarketing

Should your business advertise on Facebook or LinkedIn? Here are a few things to consider.

March 6, 2019 Comments

Should we advertise on social media?

Unlike traditional print advertising in which we pay for the amount of space on a page and the number of issues in which an ad will appear (for example), social media advertising offers many avenues to get ad messaging in front of potential customers. The costs are determined, not just on a set amount per exposure to that audience, but in competition with others vying for that same audience. If it sounds like we’re talking about an auction, we are. For much social media advertising, you actually bid on getting your ad in front of your audience. You will notice terms like pay-per-click (PPC) associated with bid-based advertising. Other options of setting fixed prices to reach verified target markets on social media require a larger investment and are available mostly to big brand advertisers.

Social media platforms often say that cost is both the overall amount you spend on advertising and the cost of each desired result. This is overly simplified. However, if your desired result is to increase your number of Facebook followers or garner more LinkedIn comments, you could say that if you spend $100 a month and get five new followers each month, the cost of follower acquisition is $20 per follower. (We say this is overly simplified because there can be many other factors that influence cost, including your time, messaging development, ad and artwork creation, etc.)

When we at Stone’s Throw think of social media advertising as part of the overall promotional activity of a smaller to medium-sized business, we focus much more intently on moving prospects closer to you. How can we get that prospective customer close enough to have a conversation? That conversation can happen on a social media platform, yes, but for businesses like ours, we want to have that conversation privately. We want to ask questions that reveal challenges, exchange ideas, and answer questions as the consultative souls we are. So, one of our promotional goals is to spur a one-on-one exchange, either through email, telephone, video conference, or an in-person meeting. If social media advertising can get us to that goal, we think it could be worth a trial run. Start small. Assess. Branch out.

Just starting out on social media? Here are a few things you should know.

November 15, 2017 Comments

Do you have a sales process?

Larger companies typically understand how to leverage their marketing efforts to grow business. Part of that understanding is manifest in an institutionalized lead qualification and sales process. Salespeople undertake rigorous training on the features and advantages of products and services, how to use recommended marketing materials, and even how to overcome customer objections. But, having a workable sales process helps businesses of all sizes.

You likely have a sales process already, even if you haven’t memorialized it in print. Have you tried writing it down? Not only will it help you save time with each prospect, it will help you identify where you could lighten up or fortify activities. We know it’s all about making connections and building relationships, not about getting caught up in data entry and recordkeeping, but outlining your process is likely to help streamline your efforts for optimal effectiveness.

Whether you are an entrepreneur or you market a growing mid-size business, reviewing the phases of your company’s selling process will help you ensure you have all the tools necessary to build your business with increased opportunities. Download our quick guide to getting organized with your sales process.

For ideas on how to position and market your business, let’s talk. Give your salesperson all the communications material needed for optimal performance: introductory email content, an informative website, capabilities brochures, spec and sell sheets, email marketing campaigns, and even telephone scripts for initial calls and recommendations for online CRMs.

June 29, 2016 Comments

Happy anniversary!

Is your business or product reaching a milestone? Celebrate it.

This year marks our 25th anniversary and has had us looking back through our archives. The following recommendations began as advice to a client. They’re perfectly suited for today, and bear repeating.

If, like Stone’s Throw, you are nearing a significant anniversary, congratulations! Experience is a valuable business asset. Businesses that stand the test of time foster trust, confidence. When your business or product reaches a milestone anniversary, let your clients and colleagues know about it.

Whether you decide to do a few labels for your stationery and a single press release, or several activities culminating in an awards reception, let’s call your anniversary activities a “program.” No matter the details, whatever you do will and should serve as a marketing communications opportunity. If at all possible up front, determine the length of time you’d like to dedicate to your anniversary program, determine a budget for the program, create a timeline for program events and activities, and assign responsibilities for each project or task. At the risk of sounding crass, like other communications programs, an anniversary program easily falls under the category of business building in all its forms and departmental labels: business development, public relations, marketing, lead generation, corporate communications, sales and promotion, etc. As upbeat and celebratory as some of the events to mark them may be, make no mistake, anniversaries mean serious business.

Whatever you plan to do, try to focus on and involve your clients, employees, community and any other groups that influence your company. This will also help you determine which anniversary themes and events will resonate most.

We’ve put together a list of ideas for helping to mark the occasion, and perhaps create a little buzz and good will with your clients, employees and other business colleagues. The list begins with the most practical and least expensive. It’s certainly not all-inclusive, but it should help to get your creative wheels turning.

Do a bit of digging. Browse through your company archives and scrapbooks with the aim of rediscovering your company, recording a company history timeline, collecting photos and news items that may help tell your anniversary story, etc. This research may help set the tone for your anniversary and spark ideas to commemorate it. For example, you might use the material to create a reception-area display or a web page of your company’s four-decade history. Be sure to get your team involved in the digging. Encourage employees to bring in photos from their time with the company, too.

Establish an anniversary theme. This could include a special logo and tagline – Clients first for fifty years, Celebrating a Million Widgets, etc.

Tell your story. Write a press release that isn’t simply an announcement of your anniversary, but shows how relevant your anniversary is in 2016. Talk about the economic climate changes your business has weathered. Mention other events that parallel your history. Showcase employees that have been with the company over its history. Allow readers to see some of what so many years of successful experience looks like. Perhaps provide helpful information about your area of business expertise. You should tailor the release to the particular media outlet. Post anniversary content on your social media accounts and blog (LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). Submit content or press releases to appropriate trade and business journals and other publications.

Let people see (and hear) your success. Include your anniversary logo and tagline on all communications materials. Teach employees how to use the logo in email signatures. Provide your employees with labels to use on existing stationery, invoices and envelopes; integrate the anniversary logo in specially printed letterhead, invitation and other materials. Make sure all of your trade dress includes reference to your anniversary (trade booth graphics, employee recruitment posters, billboards, advertisements, brochures).

You may also want to create a few posters to use internally – a thank you to your clients in the reception area and thank-yous to employees in common areas.

Consider adding an anniversary or thank-you message to the recorded greeting on your company’s phone answering system and/or integrate it into reception greetings and phone answering.

Show you care. The possibilities are endless. Here are a few ideas that don’t have to be exorbitantly expensive in order to be effective and appreciated:

Sponsor a team for a youth sport, a charity walk or a marathon fundraiser. Provide T-shirts and a hospitality tent or table at the event.

Offer clients an anniversary package deal. Are there a few services you might bundle together at “anniversary” pricing?

Plan and sponsor a community event. Contact the town in which you operate your business to see if there are opportunities for you to plant a tree or a garden in one of its parks or donate a piece of sculpture or playground equipment. Provide a free professional services workshop in concert with one of the area colleges. Institute a scholarship. Create a time capsule. Invite the media to the event by sending out a news release prior and contacting editors personally (especially the community news). Tie the event into your company mission.

Throw a party.

It’s easy to celebrate with an employee-only party on premises, but you may want to consider inviting clients and employees to something more celebratory in a special location. Consider recognizing anniversaries within your anniversary; recognize employee and client loyalty with awards. Show a slide show of your scrapbook. Schedule the party to coincide with your actual anniversary date. Be sure to photograph the event and share the photos (web site, bulletin board, newsletter, press releases, etc.).

Give a few gifts.

Giving a small, quality token of appreciation can go a long way. Depending on the theme for your anniversary, select gifts that will bear your logo and tagline. Match the item with your mission and the theme of the anniversary. Personally, I would choose and recommend recycled, repurposed and green giveaways over cheap and mass-produced plastic bits. “Honor” charitable contributions, a healthy plant, flowers, good food and well-made chocolates top my list – all green and all customizable. Gift cards and recognition awards can be quite meaningful, especially for your staff.

Tap into your creative team.

If you’re at a loss for where to begin, or simply don’t have enough time to get things started, why not use your trusty creative resources to help develop your anniversary concept and bring it all together? Like your favorite writer or designer? (That’s my shameless promotional plug.)

No matter how you celebrate and share your story, happy anniversary!

All my best,

Deanne

October 9, 2015 Comments

Plans for holiday marketing?

It’s that time of year again. Many seasonal celebrations dot the fourth quarter like the holes in Swiss cheese, making the coordination of schedules more challenging and finishing team projects less likely. Where many of us see this time as providing welcome breaks for refueling, some of us see it as an interruption in the momentum we’ve worked diligently to generate over the past nine months, or as a time to cram to meet the fading year’s goals and objectives. Where do you fall?

Whether traditional, national or religious, holidays are a part of our shared experiences during the late autumn and early winter weeks. They also offer a built-in reason for business owners and marketers to reach out to clients and prospects. Is holiday marketing part of your business plan? Think about how a few holiday communications may meet your company’s marketing strategy.

Let’s get beyond the holiday card and email. (Although, let’s not forget them.) Have you planned an open house with a theme that reflects your new proprietary technology? Are you hosting a client appreciation event that features a 10-minute presentation on how your services benefit the attendees? Will you count down to New Year’s Eve with a cool tip each day that you’ll post on social media? Will your business sponsor a charity’s year-end festivities or a community playhouse’s December performances?

If you haven’t already, start planning. And, if you need a bit of help, give us a call. Happy holiday season! Enjoy it all.

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