small business marketing Archives - Stone's Throw Creative Communications

November 13, 2023 Comments

Company naming and brand identity for a newly launched community for professional coaches

Assignment:

Create an identity for a newly formed community for professional coaches, which reflects the core benefits of membership and the supportive nature of the experience.

Process:

Stone’s Throw met with the community founder to develop a communications strategy and creative brief for naming the organization and designing its brand identity. By identifying strategic mileposts, we were able to provide name options with rationales and suggestions for each option’s branding potential.

Results:

Through the process of naming, a brand concept began to resonate, spurring the creation of “Coach Springs”: a brand, a community, a destination for professional coaches.

We enjoyed working with the community’s founder to capture the essence of her idea: to redefine continued learning, growth networking, and support in the coaching universe. As we began to explore names for this new venture, we realized we were engaged in world-building. Welcome to Coach Springs – a brand, a community, and a destination for professional coaches.

May 3, 2023 Comments

Are you avoiding 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 marketing practices. Some think 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 see one of three different circumstances. The first, and most common is a scenario in which the firm owner or company leadership sees the need for better marketing and doesn’t know where to start – or restart – or doesn’t have the internal resources to sustain the effort necessary to create forward momentum. The company may even have exhausted its 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 is when the company owner believes that better marketing will help grow her business and to that end 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.

A third common scenario is when 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 assessor and judge. But before we can do that, we ask them to show or tell us what they’re currently doing to market the organization. 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 any often-used “brand” language
Website
Social media accounts – profiles and posts, including curated (or reposted) content
Advertisements
Email marketing
Letters and communication to clients and colleagues
White papers or blog posts
Capabilities package
Sales materials
Proposals and qualifications packages
Videos
Etc.

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

Now, ask the following questions:

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 either explicitly or in images, tone, and style? If you only had your marketing materials as reference, could you answer these questions>

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 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.

Pro tip: Be honest with your audit answers. When approached with an open mind, the process can yield stronger, more resonant marketing communications that move your audience closer to your organization.

March 7, 2023 Comments

In a world of overwhelm, be enough.

In conversation with Deanne Napurano, Creative Director, Writer, Editor

Perhaps I’m being a little too esoteric with this line, but that’s even part of the point. We are all inundated with information and data. News flows constantly. We can dip our toe in the news river or dive in head first just by looking at our phones or our watches. Wherever we get our stories, the newsfeed continuously scrolls from critical global events to celebrity fashion to laundry-folding hacks to cute puppy videos and back again. Some marketers’ ads look like they could be personal videos of a friend of a friend giving you earnest advice on vegetable storage bags, lash-lengthening gels, or gaming apps. As a marketer, how can you hope to be noticed in the midst of so very much? My thinking? Stay in your lane. Do you. Don’t meet the overwhelm. Know the problem you solve. Communicate it clearly, honestly. Know that your efforts represent something worthwhile for your optimal client…and tell that story. That’s enough. Be steady, authentic, and clear. In a world of overwhelm, being enough stands out.

February 15, 2023 Comments

As with all marketing communications, set goals for your social media efforts.

With any planning, we are taught by our own efforts during the process of articulating goals, selecting paths toward fulfilling those goals, and determining how to measure our progress. Planning uncovers obstacles and opportunities. Planning teaches. Because it’s ongoing and subject to strategy shifts and market influences, it will always require navigational tweaks (and sometimes even U-turns).

Set general goals for your social media activity.

Increase website traffic.
Grow an audience.
Increase engagement.
Build brand awareness.
Generate leads.

Set goals specific to your organization.

Increase contact us form submissions.
Increase whitepaper downloads.
Attract your target audience to a special event.
Increase registrants for a seminar or conference.
Garner more donations.
Attract more qualified applicants.
Earn new business.
Grow email list.
Leverage as a real-time channel for improving customer service.
Increase video viewership.

For each goal, use the SMART framework – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely – or another goal-setting framework to help determine, record, and track expectations and achievement in a document or a preferred software program.

What does success look like?

For each goal, identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics (measurements) that will help show when that goal is reached.

General goal examples:

For a goal of growing social media audience, we would look to metrics that include:

Follower count
Impressions
Post reach

For a goal of increasing website traffic, we would look to metrics that demonstrate conversion, like:

Website analytics for social media referrals
Link clicks from social media post to website and/or blog

Look for correlations; ask questions.

In the two examples above, we would watch the numbers associated with each metric and their relationship to each post on social media.

Do those numbers show more people have seen the post? Engaged positively or negatively with a particular post?
Was that a positive performance based on our goals?
Should we increase or decrease a certain type of post? At a certain time?

Watching the metrics assigned to these general goals tells us a lot. But increasing this kind of performance may not get customers, partners, or applicants close enough to the organization to begin the kind of conversation that leads to doing more of what your organization is built to do.

Specific goal example:

A goal of attracting more qualified applicants is an example of a social media goal designed to bring a segment of your audience closer to you, so close that you would be engaged in a transaction that supports your organization’s purpose. The metrics to measure the effectiveness of social media activity around this goal may include:

Determining the criteria for qualified submissions
Tracking the number of qualified applicants received daily and overlaying that with the timing of social media posts encouraging submission
Tracking website analytics, click-throughs/referrals, post link clicks, and post-engagement metrics

We have to go outside the metrics provided by social media platforms or social media management software to understand the full story.

Beyond metrics: Listening for voice-of-consumer (VoC) data

Social media metrics can help bolster decisions that have been made based on more traditional methods of collecting feedback from your audiences
- surveys
- feedback forms
- roundtable discussions
- interviews
- process-related comments
- content-related comments
Be wary of relying solely on social media metrics to change course in business or communications strategy
- does social media capture all of your optimal audience?
- does your optimal audience use social media exclusively for its news and communications?
Use social media to listen and learn beyond your own posts’ metrics
- audit social media posts for topics relevant to your organization’s offering
- audit your industry’s thought-leaders for their hot topics
Despite its popularity, social media may not reach all of your market

What are you learning from your social media efforts?

Common social media terms simplified

New to social media?

Considering advertising on social media?

February 13, 2023 Comments

What are you learning from your social media efforts?

Most social media platforms and social media management tools provide some recommendations for the kinds of metrics (measurements) we should be tracking. There’s a lot of information available. Much of it is very helpful for influencers who attract advertisers and sponsors based on the number of followers and interactions they have on their social media accounts. For those of us who work business to business or organization to organization, we have to temper that information with more meaningful questions.

We may not find ready answers to these relevant questions by looking at the numbers provided by social media platforms and social media management tools:

• How can we look at social media metrics and understand how they translate into advancing our professional relationships or earning more business?

• Does engagement with a follower on Facebook convert to the submission of an application for employment, a consultancy project, or a contribution from a donor?

• What should we measure to give us a better idea of the success of our social media campaigns?

• How do we define social media success when it comes to our overall communications or marketing strategy?

Why measure?

Two words: budget and accountability. For some, social media can become a time eater. For some who pay to boost posts or advertise on social media, that time eater can also eat cash. There’s no “set it and forget it”.

We’re looking for correlations.

All social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) provide basic analytics for your organization’s social media pages’ performance, including measurements for post engagement, impressions, and click-throughs. Most provide those analytics through a dynamic administrator dashboard accessible by those who have been expressly authorized by the owner of that social media page.

Most subscription-based social media management tools, like Hootsuite, consolidate and overlay your social media activity across several platforms and individual social media profiles into one dashboard. Additionally, they suggest optimal future posting times based on computer-analyzed past performances of posts. By offering a consolidated picture of posts and post performance, management tools aim to foster efficiencies in scheduling and reporting. As social media features continue to evolve, social media management tools continue to expand their service offerings to remain useful.

For those of us not engaged in retail transactions, we must find the correlation between social media performance, other communications initiatives (advertising, direct mail, etc.) and our ultimate growth (transactional) goals (securing contracts, forming partnerships, increasing application submissions, etc.) to understand the effectiveness of our activity. To do that, we must also work outside social media management tools for the most meaningful analytics.

Common social media terms simplified

New to social media?

Considering advertising on social media?

November 14, 2022 Comments

Stone’s Throw recognized by national LGBT chamber and New Jersey chapter.

We are honored to be spotlighted by the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC) – and we’re proud to have achieved LGBT Business Enterprise certification.

“Certification as an LGBT Business Enterprise represents a big step in any business’s journey toward greater authenticity. We are proud to be aligned with others who also recognize this step as creating more opportunities to work toward equity with compassion and excellence,” explains Janice Mondoker, Partner.

Many thanks to the New Jersey Pride Chamber of Commerce (NJPCC) for featuring Stone’s Throw in a Member Spotlight. We’re lucky to be a part of the Chamber and celebrate its good works supporting equity and inclusion.