Got this one from a colleague that I look up to in the field of Marketing and Strategy.

Here is a snippet..

The financial service industry needs to rebuild trust. Without trust, the industry cannot stand. When a Goldman Sachs would sell financial derivatives products to its clients, and create a counter product to bet against them on the basis that they would fail and made billions of dollars, on the basis of its successful bet, something has fundamentally gone wrong with banking. The engagement of the US Congress with Goldman Sachs executives was very revealing. The Goldman executives tried to show that they did not break the law, that what they did was legally permissible. It does not matter. It is unethical. Goldman Sachs clients who bought the financial derivatives products that it sold trusted it. Goldman, by betting against its own product did not believe in what it sold.

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I just stumbled on a few articles on the Three.co.uk Blog and I must say that I was quite impressed with some of the stuff that I read.

A few lessons that I have learnt from reading this and other Corporate Blogs:

1. Blogging is a good avenue to reach out to existing and potential customers.
2. The feedback you get, if handled properly, can be put to good use in creating a positive image.
3. Blogging doesn’t have to be the responsibility of one individual (CEO, Corporate Affairs department etc.). If the cleaner has something good to say, why not give him/her a chance?
4. Articles don’t need to be long and unwieldy to read. It is also useful not to be too formal or too sloppy.

Have you read any good corporate blogs?

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The two items mentioned in this post’s title go hand-in-hand in making a success of reaching out customers.

Most businesses (especially small and medium scale ones) are finding it useful to attract their online followers to offline events. They are also finding out  that it does not have to be anything fancy. It could be something as simple as 5 – 10 people meeting for cocktails in your living room, or a BBQ in your yard…

A few principles to live by when organising such events:

1. Have an idea how many people you want to have around. Crowd control is good so you get a good chance of meeting everyone.
2. Have defined objective(s) – for example: I want everyone to leave their contact details.
3. Have an agenda – this is in line with having objective(s). It gives some structure and helps you meet defined objective(s). Just make sure your agenda is not boring.
4. Have fun – try to avoid hard selling people. It’s a turn off.

A useful tool for reaching out to new customers is Facebook’s events tool. It allows you to setup an invite to an event and get people to commit (or not) to attending your event.

Have events worked for you?

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A resounding ‘NO!!!!’ will be the response of anyone to the above question.

The reality, however, is that many businesses are guilty of this sin online. Most businesses and brands have set-up pages and groups on Facebook and other social networking sites with the main objective of attracting people. This is a noble idea and it is to be commended.

However, it is important that if you are going to maintain a presence online, you should be ready to answer online questions and queries that come from you customers. You may be able to get away with not answering your calls in the office, but it does you absolutely no good if you don’t respond to customer queries online, as other people WILL SEE that you are not responding.

So do your business a favour and keep the (on)line(s) of communication to your customers open.

I will be glad to know what your experience has been in this regard.

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The answer to this question should be ‘Yes’, if you are doing the same thing in the same manner and expecting a DIFFERENT result.

So be honest with yourself and learn from your mistakes, research what others have done that has worked, and see if you can pick a thing or two those experiences.

Remember, life is too short for you to make all the mistakes in one life-time.

Make a change from insanity today.

What say you?

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The following is an interesting piece I read from another Greg – Greg Satell.

We like to have rules. Rules make it easy for us, they absolve us of responsibility. With a little bit of work, we can learn the rules and apply them. If we can show that we’re following them, we can prove that we’re doing our jobs. Unfortunately, we won’t be doing them very well. For a system of rules to be effective, it would have to be verifiable, internally consistent and complete. Unfortunately, that is a logical impossibility. Effective management isn’t about following rules, it’s about showing good judgment in the face of uncertainty.

Read Full Article Here

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All too often, I keep going back to this speech by Steve Jobs – The Founder of Apple and Pixar Animations – and it never ceases to cause me to reflect about the path I have chosen in life.

(P.S. If your Internet is slow, the trick is to press the ‘Pause‘ button until the red indicator below the screen has filled the bar. Then you can press ‘Play‘ and listen without any interruptions)

I would be grateful to know what thoughts this speech inspires in you!

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Most people see Facebook as another way to reach out to friends. Research has shown that Facebook is fast becoming one of the addictions for people living in the United Kingdom (along with beer, coffee and free newspapers… sounds familiar?).
However, I am not sure that many people see Facebook as a tool for reaching out to their (existing and new) customers. The fact is, Facebook (and other networking sites) have become indispensable tools for growing your business today. And this applies to large multinationals, FMCGs or even the High Street Shop.
Most large businesses have a marketing strategy: this is like a Bible that helps them define what they want to do to reach out to their customers. And for some other businesses, there is also, what is called a PR (i.e. Public Relations) Strategy. This defines how they go about communicating news and interesting facts about their businesses.
If your business is going to succeed (no matter how big/small), then you must have either a marketing strategy and/or a PR strategy. Or you can have them combined. And whatever you do, your strategy(ies) must, going forward, include presence in the following:

• Networking sites: a good number of businesses have their representatives taking an active part in many a networking site. Amongst the favourites are Facebook, Linkedin, Xing, Plaxo, Twitter, Hi5. Look out for the likes of Apple, Recruitment Companies, Sony Ericsson, Nokia in these sites.
• Blogging: in the old days, companies got journalists and other ‘anonymous’ writers to offer ‘unbiased’ reviews about their products and services in Newspapers and Journals. The idea? It gives some form of credibility to have someone – whose opinions are trusted by a majority of people – to give an opinion (good or bad … but mostly good) on your products and services. Today, the trend is to send out information about your goods and services to professional bloggers. And these are able to do, online, the same thing that is done in the newspapers and journals. A good trick of the trade here is to ‘leak out your secrets’ to these blogs in such a way that it creates the suspense that is associated with gossip columns (believe it or not, gossip sells!). Companies (big and small), and their executives also have their (un)official blogs. Ask Google, Bill Gates; and Apple , and they’ll tell you about the importance of blogs.
• Online Groups: there are so many groups on the net. And you want to take advantage of as many of these as possible to further your interests. Sites like Facebook, Linkedin, and Xing, do very well in this regard. And there are other sites that just focus on discussions. Some examples include Microsoft’s TechNet, Yahoo Groups, and Nairaland (for Nigerians). It is important to identify groups that house people who are most likely to be interested in you and your business. And you have to be careful to word your discussions and comments properly so as not to offend others. I shall deal on the issue of your choice of words in another article.

In conclusion, whether you are Shell or Sanford & Son, you need to start thinking about your strategy for getting yourself out there and using the Internet to reach your customers.
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I would be glad to know what, in your opinion, are the other methods of reaching customers online. Please feel free to share this article with anyone that would find the information useful.

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Last week, I got a call from my uncle! It was a call that made me smile. He had been reading my articles and he wanted me to help him with a site he is trying to put together for his business. It made me smile, because I wasn’t exactly sure that he was one who read my articles.

Today, a good number of businesses are not sure how effective their marketing campaigns are. Yes they know that TV works, Radio Works, and it pays to advertise in the papers. But the role of marketing has moved from just advertising on any/all of these media to identifying which ones are the most effective for which campaigns. Businesses are cutting costs. And marketing costs get affected too. So your Chief Marketing Officer of today to report to the owners of the business which media work, and which ones don’t. Sadly (and it doesn’t have to be this way), a good number of CMOs have not woken up the the reality of measuring which media work the best. And for those who are measuring, a lot of the tools they use are more qualitative (than quantitative).

In this article, we shall look at two tools that do give marketing professionals today a good view of what works best:

• Your company website: it started with companies including its site address in marketing communications. Those companies who are higher up the chain include a specific address of the page that the advert is talking about (e.g. yourcompanysite.com/theproductyouareadvertising). Even better, are the companies that track what media is getting the most reach.
• SMS:  with the proliferation of mobile devices, its no wonder that SMS is fast becoming a useful method to capture customer feedback.

So how does this work? Let’s put our imaginative hats on (all characters in this story are fictituous and do not resemble anyone in real life and …) :

You own a company (THECOMPANY). And your site address is thecompany.com. You have just launched a new product called THEPRODUCT. So you have created a page on your website (thecompany.com/theproduct). You have chosen to advertise this product on taxis, on radio stations 1, 2 and 3.

Your campaign works this way:

• People who see your ads on taxis are told to either visit thecompany.com/taxi or SMS the word taxi to a shortcode to find out more.
• Those who listen to radio station 1 are told to go to thecompany.com/radio1 or SMS radio1 to know more.  Its  thecompany.com/radio2 and text radio2; and thecompany.com/radio3 and text radio3 for those who listen to radio stations 2 and 3 respectively.
• The same principle can be applied to any media (TV, Billboard) and you can reduce to any level of granualrity that you desire.

The trick though, is that all these pages redirect to thecompany.com/theproduct. A good website has counters (ask the person who built your site) and statistics at the back-end. And you can ask for how many unique people went to each of the addresses you advertised. Also, you need to keep count of unqiue people sent an SMS to your advertised shortcode. This way you get an indication of which media is doing more than the other. As you get better at this, you can also begin to define campaigns that help you determine which customer segments are reached better by some media than others (most marketing ‘professionals’. if they are honest with themselves, would admit that they are still playing the guessing game with monitoring the quantitative results of their campaigns). For example, you can actually determine if Old people listen to radio station 1 a more than they read newpaper y.

The benefit? You can use the learnings from a campaign to determine  the kind of media (combination) to use to advertise a product has features that can attract a particular customer type.

Things can be as straightforward as this. But there are some considerations for embarking on campaigns like the one described here:

1. You need to be sure that you know what you want to do for people who send you SMS. Most businesses call the customer back to do a follow up and possibly get a sale. Some others have gotten themselves a nice SMS application that allows them to send and receive messages to/from the customer to determine the interest level. Others (and this is my favourite) entice the customer with a potential for reward. This always gets people going.
2. Decide on what it would cost the customer to send you the SMS. This can be free (in which case, your business would bear the costs of receiving those messages); it can be a standard rate that the network charges for SMS; or it can be premium (your customers must really be excited about sending you an SMS for them to want to pay more than what their network charges for a message!).
3. Make sure you get your communication and web/WAP/mobile development teams to align. This is the biggest challenge for most marketing campaigns. And the major reason is that the communication and Web/WAP/Mobile development teams speak different languages. So it can be like building the Tower Of Babel to get them to work together. But it is possible, and the results can be fantastic!

I end this article by saying that your business is like your child. To succeed with your child, you must come down to the level of the child. In the same manner, you cannot decide that all this web and SMS stuff is too techie for you to understand. This is part of the feedback I gave my Uncle when he called to talk to me about building his website. Like every other business, your business is first and foremost a marketing and sales  business. The only difference is that you are marketing and/or selling a particular product(s) or service(s).

Thanks for reading. See you soon!

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P.S. Do go ahead and share this page (and previous articles on the right hand side of this page) with those you care about. I would be glad to know what other methods can be used for measuring the effectiveness of marketing initiatives.

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Everyone is trying to make a living. Some of us work for a living. Some others are brave enough to setup a business of their own. Don’t get me wrong: it does take a certain level of bravery to look for a job, to keep on going after you get turned down so many times does take courage!

For those who have decided to setup a business and go online, you are to be commended. And this article is for you. How are you going to get the best of people who come to your site?

First, you must realise certain things about the people who visit your site:

• They are busy people. So if they don’t see what they are looking for or what interests them in your site, they will move on!
• They like to get something back. Even if they haven’t given you anything.
• There are so many sites competing for their attention.
• They will be accessing your site from many devices and browsers (a lot of people seem not to bother about this fact).

So with the above facts in mind, let’s give consideration to elements of your site that you must give top priority to:

• Browsers: most sites seem to be built only for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The reality, though, is that there are many others. And of the browsers that exist, the one that are most ignored are the mobile browsers. Yes! The number of people browsing on their phones is growing. And as my Rapper friends would say: You’d better recognise! So ask yourself: How does my site look on a phone? One mistake a lot of people make is that they load their sites with very heavy pictures. And it takes anything from 15 – 20 minutes to download a page of their site in some parts of the world. Recognise that viewing your site from your laptop is a different experience from someone viewing it in a Cybercafe that is run off a phone line copper wire somewhere in Africa. So, unless you are totally not bothered about people in Africa (or somewhere else in the world where their government haven’t seen it fit to launch a Geostationary satellite into space), try and do the world a favour and make your site as light as possible. And whatever you do, get your site builder to ensure your site is legible on the phone.
• Your Homepage: the most important objective of your homepage is to immediately grab the attention of visitors to your site. And what word grabs attention better than the word ‘Free‘. Yes! People like anything for ‘Free’. So what can you give your customers for Free? Once you have identified what you can give them for free (and please make sure that whatever you give is something that has some value attached to it), ask for the visitors Name and Email Address in return for this freebie. These two pieces of information, are probably the most important things you can get from anyone who visits your site. Think about it this way: What are the chances that you can make friends with someone who has told you their name? Very high! All you have to do is interact with this person long enough to get them interested in you (we shall discuss this concept in another article).
• Look and Feel: this is something that turns people off on many a site. I am not going to dwell too much on this, but you want to make sure that the mix of colours are appeal to eyes; the fonts are consistent; your style is consistent (e.g. links should all look the same), there is some sense of symmetry/arrangement. And you can’t go wrong with a white background.
• The words you use: make sure your choice of words - especially on the homepage – tell how you can help meet a need. The old ask-a-question-and-provide-the-answer method works well (Example: Is that headache killing you? We can make you come alive!). You also want o give a sense of ease. So be careful not to be too formal in your communication.  Relax! Your site is there to make friends. And if your visitors become your friends, its most likely that they’ll patronise you.

So there you go! There are so many things to say about what should or shouldn’t be on a site. I guess its all summed up on these words: Put your self in your customers shoes and think of things that are attractive to them. Don’t let your first priority be that you want to make a sale. If you do the right things, the sale would come.

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P.S. I would be glad to know what your opinion is about other considerations that should be given to succeed online.

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