C’mon, dare me – say I shouldn’t buy it.

 
Something curious happened to me the other day.  We were having connectivity issues and, in talking to the Comcast (my isp) guy, he mentioned cable ‘insurance’.  Basic idea is this – if there’s a problem with your internet and they send a tech out to your address, one of two things will happen:

a) the tech will find out the problem is their fault and fix it free of charge
or
b) the tech will find out the problem is your fault and you pay a $50 service fee.

However, there’s an insurance policy.  So, if I have the insurance in place and the tech comes to my place of business and finds out the bad connection is my fault, I’m not charged the $50 – it’s free. 

Long story short, the tech/salesperson on the phone told me he didn’t think I needed the insurance.  Contrary to what I would have assumed should happen, this instantly piqued my interest.  Here was a guy specifically telling me NOT to buy the insurance, so I stopped, hesitated, then proceeded to weigh the cost (which was low) and benefits of the insurance and ended up buying the insurance plan.

I later thought about this peculiar transaction.  If the sales guy had given me the ’sell’, told me about all the benefits of having insurance, etc etc, I undoubtedly would have said no.  Is this because I hate to be pitched?  Possibly.  But more than likely, the ‘pitch’ itself is what devalues the service.  If you have to ’sell’ me on the product, it’s probably a piece of crap.  However, as in the case of the cable insurance I purchased, the fact that I was told NOT to buy the product opened me up to wanting to really scrutinize the offer.  Something that, had I been given a regular sales presentation, never would have happened.

I’m so numb, so jaded by sales pitches, that someone has to literally tell me, “Don’t buy my product“, to get me to take a look at their offer. 

The lesson here is this.  If you’re trying to sell people something, they’re wise to your ways.  This is old news, yes.  There’s talk everywhere of banner blindness, drops in ad effectiveness, etc, etc and this scares a lot of people.  It shouldn’t though.  If anything, I believe it’s a good thing.  It means that those individuals and companies that shoot straight, tell it like it is and whose mission is to simply and completely meet the needs of their customers/traffic/audience, win.  Do that and do it well, and your sales will reach heights that no amount of fluffing could achieve.

Image courtesy of PA Pundits

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Remember What Your Mother Said: Say ‘Thank You’.

Here’s a quick little thing I’ve been doing since starting this blog that’s been GREAT for initiating new relationships -

Blogs naturally get links.  I make a post, one of our readers finds it interesting and posts a link to us for their own readers. But, instead of doing the ‘usual’ thing and simply looking fondly at the new links to my blog, then moving onto my next task, I’ve started individually emailing every person that links to us and thanking them.

The problem:  It’s easy to think of the internet as a faceless environment, so, the idea here is to think of your website as if it’s a brick and mortar business.  Think of it this way.  If you run a sandwich shop and the mechanic across the street is continually sending his customers over to your place for a sandwich, wouldn’t you personally thank him?  Maybe set up some kind of beneficial relationship?

The web’s no different.  If Joe over at thecarblog.com is sending traffic to your Honda blog, he’s doing you a MASSIVE favor.  So, thank him!  Send him an email, say hello and see if there’s anything you can do for him. 

Sure, it can be a bit time consuming but trust me, it’s worth it. 

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Are You In a Relationship?

I recently went down to LA to help my grandparents move.  Long story short, the trip culminated in a 20 hour drive with my father in a moving truck.  Suffice it to say, we got some time to chat.

 He mentioned something that’s been whirling around in my head since, and as it applies to today’s post, I thought I’d mention it.  He had a good friend a few years ago, Dave, that died of Hodgkins Disease.  Before he died and realizing that a terminal condition gives it’s ‘victim’ a unique perspective on things, my dad asked Dave what he believed to be the most important thing in life.  “What’s the key to happiness?”

His answer was simple.  Relationships. 

It’s not money, success, knowledge or possessions, he said. It’s simply your relationships with those around you. Your friends, your family, your colleagues.

I happen to agree.  Ironically, I also happen to believe that money, success, knowledge and possessions can all spring forth from strong, positive relationships.  So, yes, you CAN have your cake and eat it too.

Business, by its defenition, is all about the almighty dollar.  But, here’s a little secret.  The question should not be:

“How can I make more money?”

Instead, it should be:

“How can I create deeper, more positive, more meaningful relationships?”

Here’s why.

In the end, these two ‘philosophies’ can achieve the same goal.  The differences, however, are colossal.  Going at business with a “how-can-I-make-more-money” philosophy is immensely short-sighted.  No one likes a money-hungry fool (yes, they can smell you coming) and even if your strategy happens to be successful, you’ll ONLY have money to show for it.  Nothing else. 

Working from a “how-can-I-create-a-meaningful-relationship” perspective, you not only create an environment in which people will want to work with you, but people will think of you for future projects, refer you to their friends and in many cases, bend over backwards to help you when you need it.  You will, in fact, increase the chances of your overall success, reaping the benefit of making money AND having fantastic relationships (which, to be honest, are a lot more rewarding anyway).

So, try changing your focus from figuring out how you’re going to make that buck, to figuring out how you’re going to make that friend.  It may sound campy, but the more you put into your relationships, the more they’ll put into you. 

Tomorrow, I’ll post a really simple tip you can start using NOW, that’s helped us create some fantastic relationships.

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11 Questions EVERY Marketer Needs to Ask (online segmentation and targeting)

Everyone puts their online marketing plans together in a different way.  Some have a checklist, some look at other plans and replicate, some wing it.  I ask questions. 

I’ve found that asking questions allows me to focus my brainstorms and instead of putting me into a ‘do this and this and this’ frame of mind, it allows me to explore and delve deep into the possibilites that make sense for the particular product/service I’m working on.  Asking focused questions opens potential doors and leaves my mind’s options open, rather than specifically defining its path.  Sure, when you get down to it, it’s semantics.  But hey, it works better than any other process I’ve found.  Who am I to argue?

I have a specific set of questions that I ask when developing any new marketing plan.  These questions have been amassed over the years when I found something in particular helped, there was an idea I routinely needed to keep in mind, or just thought it was a good concept to consider.  As the list has gotten longer, I’ve divided it into categories:

- pricing
- segmentation and targeting
- product/positioning/differentiation
- branding and message creation
- sales and pushing the purchase
- message delivery
- PR
- customer relationship management

I’ve found that the difference between a successful marketing campaign and an unsuccessful one, is sometimes very small.  Some missed piece or an overlooked detail.  Using this site as a platform, I’ve decided to share my ‘marketing questions’ with you. 

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Undressing Your Market 

Since I’m a fan of going out of sequence, I’m first going to focus on online segmentation and targeting.  To run through the basics really quick, the idea behind segmentation is to figure out who your product’s audience is and who it can be.  You can divide a market by demographic (income, gender, etc), psychographic (beliefs), socio-cultural (class, relation to others) and location.  You want to figure out exactly WHO could potentially be interested in purchasing your product.  The more defined your segmentation (getting into their heads, undressing them and figuring out what they want), the more defined, and potentially succesful, your marketing campaign will be. 

Your overall message and marketing campaign will be based on how you determine and examine your target market.

Why Is Segmenting Important Online? 

 In a word, segmentation and targeting is HUGELY important in the online environment.  It’s no different than offline.  How you segment your market determines how you’ll craft the message your audience will see, what websites you advertise on, what medium you’ll use to deliver your message, who you should partner with for a joint venture and what approach your marketing strategy will take.  Literally EVERYTHING starts with segmentation and because a marketing strategy builds on itself, missed steps and cut corners in the beginning can kill a campaign and product.

Best Bets

There’s a big push in the last few years to focus marketing efforts on small segments of the population.  The belief here is that the better you segment and target, the more marketing resources you’ll save and the more influential your message will be.  This allows small brands to effectively make a big splash with small segments and big brands to create multiple messages (for the same product) that appeal to many different segments.

Of course, the philosophy here is to define what your ‘best bet’ is.  The answer to the question of “Who’s most likely to purchase our product?”, will be your money segment.  Putting marketing dollars here will give the most likely returns.  However, actually figuring out which segment you’ll go after, is a question of your targeting.

Bullseye Targeting 

How you decide to “address” your segment(s) is defined by targeting.  You’ve heard the term “mass marketing”, right?  This is simply a targeting strategy.  There are generally 3 ways to target a market. 

- the shotgun approach (otherwise known as mass marketing) in which the business delivers their product’s message to everyone, regardless of demographic, etc.
- singular message and segment, where 1 specific segment is chosen to exclusively deliver a message to (hopefully, the biz has chosen the segment most likely to purchase their product).
- multiple messages, multiple segments, in which the business (usually with a hefty marketing budget) creates a set of specific messages for different segments.  An example of this might be if Pepsi decides to market Mountain Dew with mountain bike commercials to outdoor sports fanatics, a caffeine message to gamers and a counter-culture message to 20-somethings who are unhappy with the current administration.

So basically, segmentation and targeting go hand-in-hand.  The population you’re going to market to is defined and your strategy for targeting them with your message is initiated.  It can get as scientific as the business wants and has a budget for.  Fortune 500 companies spend some serious coin finding out who is and who could be interested in their products.  Smaller companies that don’t operate on these budgets can do a pretty bang up job with some simple brainstorming sessions.

Getting Drunk on Market Research

If you can afford it, market research is something that’s easy to spend a LOT of money on.  But, how much do those extra dollars help?  I think of market research like wine.  Big companies can afford a $200 bottle.  Small companies can squeek out a respectable $50 bottle.  Sure, the $200 bottle might be better, but is it really worth the extra $150?  There’s a lot you can deduce through sole observation and some of the most intriguing, innovative and influential marketing campaigns have come from the grey matter of one guy. 

So, how’s the small company segment and target its market?  Try asking some questions:

The Questions

1. Who’s most interested?  What does your product do and who’s most likely to be interested in your product or service?  Pinpoint an initial ‘most interested’ group.

2. WHO are they?  What are their characteristics?  Who are they?  Think in terms of:
income, age, sex, geographics, income, class, interests, dislikes, habits, desires, beliefs, fears

3. Where’s the inequity?  Which of these characteristics is applicable to the product you offer?  In other words, which desire, fear or interest from the question above is ‘fed’ by your product?

4. Who else is…  You’ve already pinpointed an initial group that you think likely to be interested in your product and the characteristic that makes them interested.  Here comes the big question: What other groups exhibit the same trait or characteristic that could make them likely buyers too?

(example:  Fanta, the orange softdrink, started a marketing campaign a little while ago targeting the hispanic community.  They successfully broadened their share of the market simply by first identifying a new group of potential users and then crafting a message specifically for them).

OR another way to think of it is…

Subgrouping: You’ve established that a certain group of people will be interested in your product.  What are the subgroups of this group?  (example:  You’re selling a weight loss product.  Of course, the most interested group will be people who want to lose weight.  However, this is a massive market with many different, definable groups within it.  There are overweight 50-something men who are getting ready to retire, middle aged women who want to look like they did at 20, overweight teenagers who want to get a date, etc.  You can go on and on and on.  Each of these groups are VERY different than the others, would require a different message be delivered to them and through a different medium.  Are there any )

5. Best bets.  Are any of these groups a better bet than others?  Does your product’s ethos ‘fit’ with any particular group?

6. One or multiple messages, one or multiple segments? Can you fit your product to multiple groups? Should the message (marketing) they receive differ between them?

7. Holes in the competition.  Who is NOT being targeted by competitors that may be interested in your product/service? 

8. Separating the wheat from the chaff.  How can you separate the buyers from the non-buyers? (For example, if you have a product that appeals to a certain ‘type’ of rugby player, can you somehow separate the interested parties from the uninterested by behavior?)

9. Would-be buyers.  Is there an audience that could be buyers, but are not?  Who are they?  Why are they not buying your offering?  How can you either change the product/service or its position to garner this audience? (based on behavior, demographic, interest, media exposure, etc)

10. Layers of interest.  Most products have multiple layers of interest.  For example, say you own a theatre (plays, not movies).  Each play will appeal to people who like plays – obviously.  So, those interested in plays will be one target market.  However, each play is about something.  One play is about tennis.  Another play is about living in the city.  Another is about aliens.  Each and every one of these plays will appeal not only to people who like plays, but also to people who like it’s specific subject matter.  So the question is, what other layers of interest might your product have and who ELSE might be interested in it?

11. Eyeball Parties: Where do my target audience’s eyeballs gather? What common events, activities, websites, reading materials, interests, etc, do they participate in? (this will be considered in much greater detail with message creation and delivery, but should be thought about now also)

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The BIG Guide to Partnerships: Choose, but choose wisely.

This is the first installment in the ‘What We’ve Done’ series.  In other words, how 3 guys built a successful web-based business.  The idea of this series is to quantify exactly what we’ve done that’s been successful (and what we’ve done that hasn’t) so you can replicate the good and avoid the bad. 

This week’s installment:  Partnerships.

Everything started with a partnership.  I knew Omar (partner #1) from a previous position I had held as an affiliate manager (Omar was an affiliate) and Omar met Kirill (partner #2) one day in a forum.  He struck up a conversation, one thing led to another and after a few weeks, they started talking about doing a project together.  Omar brought us together, we discussed the potential, some of our reservations, logistics were worked out over the following couple of weeks (the setting up of the business entity, banking, etc) and we were on our way.

Now, I realize it sounds like I’m cutting out pieces of the story and I suppose I am to a certain extent, but none of them pertain to the actual formation of the partnership.  What I’ve said is a pretty accurate look at how we started.  Sounds easy right?  Read my disclaimer…

Personal Disclaimer:  I believe in being completely transparent with our practices and business, especially when doling out recommendations.  So, given this, please note that in forming our Halfagain LLC partnership, we did NOT use all of the tools and strategies I talk about below.  In short, we got lucky.  It doesn’t mean anyone will, and in fact, many haven’t.  So, use the strategies below – they will GREATLY enhance the likelihood of your partnership’s success. 

Issues are inevitable.

Our partnership, like most, isn’t perfect.  Sometimes one person feels like they’re doing all the work.  Other times, a partner may feel that more should be done in a certain area that is handled by the other.  And sometimes, we have regular old disagreements about how to handle certain matters.

The issue though is not the problem, it’s how the problem is solved.  It’s important to consider that partnerships aren’t dissolved because of problems, they’re dissolved due to a lack of solutions.

So, as cliché as it sounds, good communication and open-mindedness are the first rules to live by.  Think about it – if you’re not willing to candidly communicate AND remain open to the fact that your idea may not be the best option, what’s the point of having a partner? 

Fun fact:  I still have not met Kirill in person and only met Omar once.  All communication has been done over ICQ and skype. 

Why a partner?

Why are partners such a powerful option for the entrepreneur?  Here’s the short list.  Partners…

- Provide expertise where you have none.
- Temper your crazy, destined-for-failure ideas.
- Urge you to execute your better ones.
- Are another brain to bounce ideas off.
- Push you when you’d rather be on the couch watching a Lost marathon.
- Are simply more resources to throw at a project (Two heads and all that.)

What to look for?

Since I’m a fan of lists, I’ll give you another one.  Here are what I’ve found to be the most important attributes in a partner.  Your partner must …

- be good at what you’re not.
- be trustworthy.
- be a compatible personality.
- have similar business philosophies.
- be passionate about the business.
- have good track record in their area of expertise.

I won’t take the time to explain each one of these, as I believe most of them to be self-evident.  Just think of finding a partner in the same way you’d think of finding an employee.  If you wouldn’t hire them for the job, then they’re not the right choice.

Pitfalls to watch for.

Family.  Many will say this, but I don’t necessarily agree.  The pitfall to avoid on this one is to make sure you’re partnering with them because of their assets, NOT because they’re family.  Partner with someone for the wrong reasons and you’re sunk.

Trust.  Bottom line, partnering with someone who you don’t fully trust is a very BAD idea.  It doesn’t matter what they offer, how excited they are or how successful you think the business will be with them.  If you don’t trust ‘em, ditch ‘em.

Motivation.  I’ve found that more often than not, if two partners have different motivations, they’re headed for troubled waters.  For example, partner #1 is motivated by creating a value-based business and partner #2 is primarily motivated by making money.  The first partner is likely to want to spend time and money injecting their business with greater value for the customer, while the second is more likely to cut corners on costs and uncomfortably squeeze customers for more revenue.  Neither of these practices will sit well with Partner #1.  Be sure that your partner has the same motivations as you.

How to find a partner.

There are many, many ways to find a suitable partner.  However, it always starts with who you know.  So, in most cases, the prerequisite to finding a partner is getting your name out there, networking and building relationships in the field in which you wish to build a business.  You’ll often find that partnerships spawn naturally from the relationships you create, so use the web’s many mediums (email, forums, IM, social media sites and other communities) to start saying hi and striking up conversations with people.

Once you find some suitable candidates, work with them on small projects to get a feel for how they work and their business philosophy.  Are things looking good?  Discuss the possibility of working with them on some bigger projects. 

Get expectations on the table – put them in writing.

Write it down baby!  Put all expectations of the partnership in writing.  You’re skipping any he-said she-said stuff, covering yourself legally and making sure that, going into the venture, each party is fully aware of the expectations of the other.  Some ideas you might want to play with…

Who’s going to have control?
If there’s an impasse, how will you handle it?
Who’s investing and how does this affect control?
Who’s handling hiring and firing?
How much time is each party ready to commit to the project?
Etc.

Have built in exit strategies.

Think of it like signing prenuptials before getting married.  If a partner wants out, how will you handle it?

Reservations:  Now’s the time to be honest.

If there’s any a time to be honest, it’s before entering into a partnership.  I believe it’s important to have a “Concerns Session”, where both potential partners sit down and hash out any (and I do mean ANY) concerns they have about the partnership, the business or any other matter they think may come up later.  If you have a reservation, get it out BEFORE getting in.

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If you have any experiences or thoughts regarding partnerships, shoot me an email.  I’d love to hear and work them into future articles.

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