I was talking with a client of mine the other day and we were brainstorming ways she could promote a new white paper / product offering and one of the things we talked about was using Social Media as a way to get the word out.  Through the course of our discussion it struck me that there are 4 levels of engagement that small business owners are using when it comes to Social Media and business.

You can find a lot of examples of each of these levels…especially the first one, which is unfortunately the largest of the four.  The remaining 3 tactics are all viable business strategies.  Which one you use will be driven by how much time you can invest in Social Business overall, what your personal style is and ultimately what you’re trying to accomplish.

The 4 levels of Social Business Engagement:

• Non-existent
• Visible
• Educate
• Engage

Let me take a shot at breaking this down into something more meaningful.  Here’s a quick diagram I drew up on my iPad.  The Y axis reflects the value a business owner gets from a particular tactic…higher is better.  The X axis reflects the amount of time spent on each tactic.

Level 1 – Non-existent

Although it’s not a tactic it is sadly the state that most business owners are in when it comes to their Social Business approach.  If you have a half filled out LinkedIn profile or a Facebook page that never gets updated or a Twitter account that was started but only has 2 tweets from last April (one of those being “Trying to figure out what this Twitter thing is all about”), then you are at the  non-existent stage from a Social Business perspective.

When you’re non-existent, you are not getting any value…in fact, you are potentially hurting your cause with an incomplete profile…but at least your not spending any time on anything.

Visible

The next level up is Visible, which is actually a viable tactic for a lot of small business owners.  This approach can provide a lot of value, especially relative to the small amount of time spent.  Being visible means that people can easily find you via search and get more information if they’re interested. 

In order to be visible, you need to pick at least 1 of the major social media platforms and invest a few hours into creating a quality profile.  I’d suggest LinkedIn if you are Business to Business and Facebook if you are Business to Consumer.

A quality profile includes a picture and a clear, interesting write-up on what you do and why someone else should care.  It should have at least a little bit of personality and include some personal information.  It should be easy to further engage with you and learn more – your profile should have a link back to your website.  You should also have a reasonable number of connections (say a couple hundred for LinkedIn…Facebook will vary based on what you’re doing) and you should spend an hour or so a week keeping it updated, posting status updates, answering questions, etc.

Educate

As a tactic, Educate includes everything on the Visible level and also includes regular educational updates across multiple channels. The best way to educate is to create great content…it could be blog posts, videos, podcasts or anything else that adds value to your target market.  With an Educate approach, not only can your prospects and partners find you, they also can see your enthusiasm and expertise – especially as you consistently share great stuff over time.

This approach can be effective with as little as a 2 to 4 hours per week – that would be the time it takes to write 1 blog post and share it in multiple places (and interact as you would for the Visible tactic).

Engage

Finally the Engage tactic is the high end of Social Business strategies.  Engagement is when you immerse yourself into 1 or more social media platforms and consciously and consistently develop your own tribe of followers (Customers, prospects, partners, etc.).  Engagement strategies are often built on education, but there are other successful engagement strategies built on personality, customer service or just being part or leading a community.

If you can successfully Engage in Social Business, you will create a fan base that can dramatically amplify your message and help drive word of mouth and opportunities your direction.  Done the right way, it’s extremely powerful and beneficial.

However…Engagement takes a lot of time and presence (there’s an expectation of real time responses, so you need to be always ‘on’).  Additionally you have to genuinely enjoy the process of connecting with your virtual tribe – if you don’t have the right kind of personality you will struggle to make this work.

How are you investing your time?

Every business owner should at least be at Visible on 1 platform.  It takes a low investment of time, anyone can do it and it will greatly enhance the number of people who can find you…remember if they can’t find you, they can’t do business with you.

Going beyond Visible is a choice.  I’m a big proponent of content marketing and Education, but there are a lot of small business owners who aren’t set up to make an Educate tactic work…and they certainly don’t have the time or effort it takes to Engage.  However it’s not all or nothing.  On the chart the levels show as discrete options, but it’s actually a smooth curve and you can scale your efforts up and down depending on your resources.

Where are you on the Social Business Engagement spectrum?  Does this model make sense?  I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments…Engage with me in the comments below and let me know what you think!

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

Photo by JD Hancock

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There’s no doubt that growing your business is an uphill battle.  It’s a challenging economy and the rules have changed for marketing and sales.  Gone are the days when you could just run an ad somewhere and expect your phone to ring. 

Effective marketing (and sales) today is a much different game than it was even 5 to 10 years ago.  Interruption tactics (like cold calling, direct mail or blasting advertisements) can still work but they are less effective every day.  Instead you have to find ways to attract your prospective clients – get them to hold up their hand and show they are interested in learning more.  Bottom line?  You have to think through your marketing and approach it strategically if you want to generate leads.  There’s no room for mistakes if you want successful marketing.

That said – here are 5 things that small business owners are doing to sabotage their marketing success in today’s environment.  Do any of these apply to you?

5 Marketing Killers

Not following up or following through

This one is a cardinal sin and it’s so stupid…but you see it happen over and over again.  A potential client expresses interest or a need in your products or services…and they don’t get any follow up or response.  It may not be a guaranteed sale, but interest is interest!

Personal example:  I recently needed to hire a caterer for an event.  A friend of mine recommended a local caterer and introduced her to me.  I expressed interest in learning more and received a quick (but friendly) response a few days later suggesting a call for more details. 

I gave her several times I was available for a call.  I received no response. 

A week later, I tried one more time to engage (running out of time for my event) and the only response I got was a phone call on a Saturday several days later during a soccer game.  Not being able to hear while at the game, I recommended a call on the following Monday…and received no response after that! 

Obviously I went with another provider – maybe my business didn’t matter, but Kansas City can seem like a small town and this particular caterer now has a bad reputation for professionalism with me (and others who I might talk to).  If you’re too busy to follow up, then you need to rework your business approach and try something different.

Recommendation – Are you following up (in a timely manner) on all of your potential leads and introductions?  If not – make that your top priority.  Not only are you potentially missing out on business, but you’re burning a referral source as well.

No consistency on marketing activities

Arguably the most important thing you can do for your marketing is to be consistent.  A great marketing message will fail if it’s not in front of people in a consistent way.  An excellent marketing tactic that’s not executed consistently is a waste of time.

How many business owners do you know who have a blog or a newsletter but rarely if ever actually update it or send it out?  Life and your business is crazy with lots of ups and downs, but if you don’t figure out how to consistently apply your marketing, you will never get out of that roller coaster world.

Recommendation – Identify at least a few tactics that you can reasonably achieve and make a black and white commitment to do those activities every week or every month.  Build on that once you’ve got the basics down.

Marketing to Everyone!

“So who do you work best with?”  If your answer is some variation on anyone who breathes, then you have already failed at your marketing and your wasting a lot of time and money.  By marketing to everyone…you are marketing to no one!

We are all getting inundated with literally thousands of marketing messages every single day.  A generic message that could apply to anyone is never going to break through that noise…and is never going to be heard.

Recommendation – Who are your BEST clients?  Carve out a subset of them and get really specific about who they are and what they’re looking for?  Try crafting a message just for that niche and see if you don’t get a much better response.

Not using Content /Educational approach for your marketing

Buyers are looking for solutions to their problems and most of the time they have several choices when it comes to providers.  Who are they more likely to choose – Company A who clearly understands the problem and provides lots of educational materials and helpful ideas or Company B who only has feature descriptions on how cool they are?  Who would you buy from?

Content and educational marketing makes you relevant to the large majority of potential clients who aren’t ready to buy yet.  If you can educate, inform and maybe even entertain someone who isn’t ready to buy yet, you stay in the running and likely top of mind for when they are ready to buy.

Recommendation – Start thinking like a consultant.  What’s the last thing you did to help educate your target market?  What could you create that would add value and establish you as an expert?

Not being found online

Quick – do a Google search on your company’s name.  Is your website on the first page of results?  If not…or if you don’t show up at all, then you don’t have any marketing.  The vast majority of buyers use online search as a key step in their decision process.  If they see your company in an advertisement but can’t easily find you online then you don’t exist and you wasted that ad!

Also do a search on the problem you solve. Does your company come up on the first page in that case? It’s more likely people are searching on problems or outcomes (keywords) than for your business name.  This is a bit harder to solve, but carries a lot more weight.

Recommendation – Quick fix…make sure you and your business have a presence on LinkedIn and Facebook – both are good sources for Google.  Longer term fix – leverage content and education based marketing (blog or articles, whitepapers other content) to address your keywords and the problems your prospects are searching for.

It’s Not Rocket Surgery!

None of the above ideas are rocket surgery…or even brain science!    However most small business owners are failing at least one of the above five ideas and many are missing on 2 or more of them.

How about you?  Are you onboard and in good shape with all 5 of the ideas above?  Anything else I’m missing that’s a critical marketing step?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

Photo by Alex E. Proimos

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Long term business success requires a lot of things done right, but one of the most critical things you can do and fully within your control is to live and breathe great customer service.

Why do some companies become an Amazon?

Hopefully the following will cause you to reflect. Maybe it will spark an opportunity for empowerment in your business.

A tale of two businesses….What company is your business modeling?

Amazon…

This past week I placed an order on Amazon and it was supposed to have Free Shipping. Somehow, I selected the wrong box during checkout and the order was processed with 2 day Shipping Charges. The shipping was almost as much as the order!

However, the Amazon solution was painless, simple, and efficient. I simply went to their website, connected to a live chat person and had two short posts explaining the situation. The reply was simple. “Mr. Steinlage your credit card will be credited the charges. Is there anything else we can help you with today?”

I didn’t have to explain my position over and over. The customer service representative didn’t have to check with a supervisor. It was over. Just like that; two simple posts and it was resolved.

Did Amazon gain a raving fan? Am I likely to be a return customer?  Would I recommend them to someone else?

Amazon has created a culture of customer service.

Local Restaurant Chain…

One of my brothers was in town recently and our families went out for dinner. One of the teenagers with my brother’s family ordered an item that was supposed to be for “kids only”, simply because that is what looked good on the menu. However, the restaurant employee was adamant that this teenager could not order this because she over the age limit. There was no reasoning, no option to pay extra, no logic, simply a policy that was drilled into this employee. The employee’s stern position even created commotion among other dining customers. It was truly bewildering to witness! In the end, we let it go and did not get the “kids only” food item.

Did this local restaurant gain a raving fan? Am I likely to be a return customer?  Will my brother (or anyone else that saw this happen) every return or recommend them to someone?

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to make sure your team, your employees, your staff, and you keep common sense in your business. You need to trust and empower your employees to make simple decisions when the opportunities present themselves.  Create a simple checklist or set of rules for what they’re allowed to manage and when they need to bring in someone else.  Hire the right people and give them room to shine.

Trust me, your employees want to make decisions that are in the best interest of your company. They want You to be pleased with their performance and more importantly, they want the customer to be happy. If you honestly don’t think they do, they shouldn’t be part of your team.

Amazon ‘Gets It’. Do you?

We would love to hear how you address this in your business. Feel free to share in the comments below.

Chris Steinlage    Kansas City Business CoachSimilar Posts:

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In his book ‘UnMarketing’ author Scott Stratten talks about a lot of things.  He talks a lot about twitter, about the essence of what marketing is today (versus 10 or 20 years ago), about the the criticality of engagement and a lot of interesting stories and anecdotes from his personal experiences.

It’s all good stuff, but it’s the discussion and examples of developing a Pull and Stay system that really made this a worthwhile book for me.  Pull and Stay refers to creating a system (or a series of systems) that will attract the right kind of prospective buyers to you and keep you front of them in an automated way.

It’s the opposite of the Spray and Pray approach – which is exactly what most business owners do when they send out all sorts of unrequested interruptions into the marketplace and hope hard that someone sees the right message, at the right time, resonates with that message and is in a position to buy!  Not a recipe for long term success!

Here are some other highlights from the book:

The main theme of the book is that business owners need to stop trying to market and just start engaging…with their existing clients, prospective and potential partners.  Be a real person and make an effort to build real relationships…sadly that’s kind of a revolutionary message.

For starters – Scott is an engaging kind of guy! Which actually both helps to prove his point and disprove it at the same time.  He lives his message and when you read the book (or especially if you listen to the audio book – I did both) he comes across as the kind of guy you’d just enjoy hanging out with.  It would be really easy to engage with a guy like Scott and clearly that’s serving him well from a business perspective.

Unfortunately many people aren’t like Scott and don’t have the natural ability to quickly and easily build relationships and engage with people.  The concepts he uses definitely work for him, but they may not work as well for the less socially skilled business owner.

It’s all about engaging

Having said that – Scott is recommending the right approach, especially for business owners.  His central message that business owners need to stop marketing and start engaging with their audience is right in line with what Seth Godin has been saying for years:

“Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t”.   – Seth Godin

And although the concept of permission based marketing isn’t new, the practice isn’t that widespread.  Those who practice it are in the minority and there’s clearly a need for most business owners to understand there is a better way to reach their prospective clients…and that is to build a real relationship with them, talk to them, be authentic, be transparent and engage. 

This is the one area where small business owners have a huge advantage over their corporate counterparts.  A small business owner can easily be a real person, which is what it takes to engage.  A big company generally finds that very hard to do.

Everything is Marketing

Another key point he makes early in the book is the idea that everything you do ties back to marketing.  How your phone is answered is marketing, what your store or location looks like is marketing…the way you respond to questions or requests…also marketing. 

Basically everything that you or your employees do influences customers and potential customers either towards your business or away from it – and with that in mind you have to look at ALL of those potential touch points and optimize them to be a positive experience if you want to excel at attracting and engaging business.

Twitter and other tactics

Scott is a huge fan of Twitter and he’s learned to use it to great effect as an engagement and marketing tool for his own business.  He makes a strong case for how Twitter can work effectively and if you’re looking to learn how it can be used to help you market or engage, this is definitely the book for you.

He also does a nice job of breaking down additional tactics and ideas – especially those focused on displaying expertise and raising awareness.  These kinds of tactics are especially effective for service industry businesses, but they can work for other businesses as well.  He covers writing (blogging, articles, etc.), videos, speaking and newsletters with examples and suggestions across the board.

Overall review – give it a read!

Every business owner would get a lot of value out of UnMarketing – the section on pull and stay ideas to attract potential clients and stay in front of them is easily worth the price of admission alone.  But there’s a lot more here.  Scott covers a lot of great marketing ideas that could apply to all businesses.  And…just as important, he’s engaging and entertaining.  It’s a fun business book to read.

My complaints are fairly small – there was some wandering around in terms of ideas and how things were organized.  There was also a lot of focus on social media (and especially Twitter).  It’s there for a reason – social media is the best way to engage with people today because the tools can give you scale and capabilities you can’t get elsewhere but his message was most compelling when talking about the underlying ideas of engagement rather than the technology…not a huge complaint, just an observation.

All in all – I recommend UnMarketing.  You’ll enjoy it, you’ll learn some things and most importantly you’ll refocus on engaging with clients and potential clients.

Have you read UnMarketing?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

photo by mccun934

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You’re going to have to learn how to market your products and services effectively.  I’m differentiating marketing from sales as the activities and efforts that draw interested, qualified buyers to ask about your product or service.  Without marketing…the process of getting people to come to you, you have a major uphill battle when it comes to growing your business with strictly outbound sales efforts.

You also have to figure out how to systematize and automate all the major components of your business.  Ultimately it needs to run like a machine…you build the framework and all the components, set up the systems that other people can run (or are automated) and it continues to generate money (and grow) even without your daily input!  It’s the only way to scale your business.

One step in this direction is the combination of these two things – Marketing Automation…building a marketing machine…a system and automation that will help your marketing run (mostly) on it’s own.

Let me give you an example – at Aspire we’ve just started experimenting with some Marketing Automation and although there’s still a long way to go, it’s off to a good start..

Goal for Aspire’s Marketing Automation

Over time we’ve found that the most effective marketing approach for the Business Advisory services we offer is educating business owners with ideas on how they can grow their business.  In order for this educational approach to be effective, it has to be relevant to the right target audience, it has to be shared gradually over time and it ties into additional educational opportunities (i.e. workshops or other events).   So the goal for Marketing Automation for Aspire is to build automated tools that will help facilitate that educational process.

Obviously this blog is a great starting point, but business owners generally don’t have time to dig through a blog to find what they really need.  The answer?  Targeted, high value information and ideas that can be delivered to interested business owners on their terms…I’m generally not available late at night…and there are only so many hours in the day, so it has to be information that’s packaged on a convenient schedule for the entrepreneur.

How does it work?

That’s where the Marketing Automation step comes in – check out out the Sign Up form at the right side of the blog (and also on the main part of the website) for a free e-Book on ‘Leading Your Business To Success’.  This is a great set of information that will benefit any business owner who’s trying to grow their business, with a lot of practical tips and ideas and now that’s we’ve done the hard work of pulling the information together, we can get it to interested business owners in a totally automated fashion.

Some of those business owners will get a lot out of the information and that’s all they want or need – great!  We’re glad to have helped out.  Others will also get a lot out of the information but they’d like help on additional ideas or other issues – that’s great too!  We’d love to meet with them and see if there’s a fit to really help them accelerate what they’re doing.

In addition to the primary set of information – we’ve also created a series of simple Tips to help business owners build Focus, Clarity and Momentum.  Same idea from a marketing automation perspective, but may appeal more to those who are looking for some quick hits rather than big ideas.

In both cases, we are delivering valuable information over time in a way that’s convenient to the reader.  Also we are building up a list of people who have given us permission to talk to them about how to grow their business.  Adding value, starting a conversation and staying top of mind for when it makes sense to take action.  That’s what marketing automation is all about.

Are you automating any of your marketing approach?  What are you using and how are you doing it?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – please share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

Photo above by ToniVCSimilar Posts:

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