aardvark marketing consultants

In amongst all the loud noises about the opportunity that Facebook offers businesses, there are a few contrary experiences.

A number of high profile organisations have closed ‘storefronts’ on the social networking site.  The latest of these, Gamestop opened in April last year to sell to the 3.5 million or more people who had declared themselves ‘fans’ of the video game retailer.  Now they’ve closed the site.

Last year Gap (5.6 million fans) opened and closed a storefront, finding that customers preferred shopping on their own site.

In an article published yesterday, Bloomberg identifies JC Penney and Nordstrom as others to have opened and closed storefronts, and quotes Wade Gerten, CEO of social media developer 8thBridge “It was basically just another place to shop for all the stuff already available on the retailer websites, I give so-called F-commerce an ‘F.’”

Sucharita Pulpuru, and analyst at Forester research said “There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop, but it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”

This suggests to me that as with any form of marketing or selling, we need to be clear in our understanding of customers – is our great new idea really adding anything that they value; does this media channel give us access to new audiences; are they really going to be receptive to our message?

Best wishes, Chris

How often in your business do you find it difficult to set priorities for your marketing? Have your ever felt that you are being bombarded with great ideas that have the potential to transform your marketing, if only you had the expertise to implement them well?

Just when you felt you had had got to grips with your traditional marketing like advertising, brochures and leaflets along comes the website. Next your website has to be found ahead of your competitors – you now need to use SEO or pay per click just to get yourself noticed.Once the website was sorted along came the social media revolution and now your website has to have links to a Facebook page, your LinkedIn profile, your blog and twitter activity. Talk to the experts right now and the latest bright new shiny objective is to have company videos on YouTube and a Google+ account.

Typically business owners and managers we talk to feel a little like a ‘rabbit in the headlights’. The huge number of choices before us means that there is a danger we can become paralysed and unable to take a sensible decision regarding investing our time and money wisely. Spread out our precious marketing budgets too thinly across too many activities and we risk being ineffective in our communication, as well as feeling exhausted by all the effort we have to put in trying to implement it all! Or perhaps the opposite problem happens, when we invest heavily into one channel of communication only to feel regret at a later date when we think we have missed out on opportunities that could have given our business a better return on investment had we opted for a different way of communicating.

Of course, the best course of action is to have a marketing plan with well thought out strategies. But ocasionally, even with sensible plans and strategies in place, we could still fail to achieve the desired results if we try to implement everything all at once.

Mike Crosson has a great way to illustrate this problem of trying to accomplish too many new strategies at once.Imagine you are on an island and you can see another island in the distance. On this second island is a pot of money. In order to access the money you need a method to build a bridge between yourself on your island and the money on the distant island – your strategy.
Let’s say, for example, you decide that LinkedIn could be the means of building this bridge between the islands so that you can access the money. You start spending a little time each day on LinkedIn, making new connections and working on your LinkedIn strategy. However a few weeks into this building activity, before it starts to work for you, someone says to you “You need to have some great videos to get your message across to customers, it’s a great way to get new business”.

They may be correct about the videos but it’s easy for you to make the mistake of dropping the LinkedIn activity before the strategy is in place and working effectively, i.e. you didn’t finish building the LinkedIn bridge between those islands first. Diverting your time and effort into having some new videos done could mean that you don’t acccess money from LinkedIN – that wasn’t finished – and you haven’t completed your video bridge either so there is no income from the video marketing.

What would happen if you then tried to start a Facebook strategy when someone else tells you this is a great way to win new business? I’m sure you get the idea.
You can watch Mike’s video via this link and then click on the third one in the sequence – How To Ensure That You Complete The Things That You Start So That You Get More Closings

So, to avoid being the rabbit in the headlights, have a plan, and have a few well thought out strategies that will connect you and your business with those exciting new opportunities or new customers. But be careful with implementating your marketing. Make sure that each communication bridge is sound and that it is accessing a good income stream before turning your attention, time and effort into the next big new shiny idea

Gill

When I was school age, one of our big heroes was Evil Knievel.  For those younger than me, in the 1970s he was probably the best known stunt man on the planet, famed as much for his crashes and near-death experiences as his successes.

His speciality was ‘ramp to ramp’ motorbike jumps, but such high risk ventures had an inevitable consequence.  At the time of his death in 2007 (not stunt-related), he was acknowledged by the Guiness  Book of World Records as the survivor of most broken bones in a lifetime – for the statistically minded he broke a total of 433!

Whilst a career in marketing, advertising or PR is unlikely to expose us to such physical threats, the opportunities to participate in stunts does still exist and so do the risks.

Today’s BBC News website has a story about how BMW’s advertising agency in Germany took the opportunity to ‘brand’ a weather front ‘Cooper’ to help promote the Mini car brand.  At a price of less than £200 with all the references there were likely to be on weather forecasts, this must have seemed like a bargain.

Unfortunately, the weather front in question has been responsible for freezing conditions that have led to dozens of deaths – not the association that BMW or any brand owner would have chosen.

What can we learn from this experience?  Firstly, like my blog about the McDonald’s twitter problem a few days ago it shows that the big brands with all their resources can still make mistakes.  Also, I think it teaches us to think through all the possible outcomes of innovative marketing activity, not just the results we hope for.

But I do hope this doesn’t end the desire of marketers and their agencies to be creative, try something different and take some calculated risks – that would be very dull indeed.

Chris

Another Twitter campaign hit the headlines last week for all the wrong reasons.  McDonald’s began a campaign to promote some good stories about the brand but when the hashtag #McDstories emerged it suddenly began attracting the wrong kind of stories.

If you want to read all the gory details there’s a summary on the Business Insider website, but what really caught my eye were the quotes from McDonald’s Social Media Director, Rick Wion.  Whilst seeking to downplay the scale of the problem, he also claimed that “With all social media campaigns, we include contingency plans should the conversation not go as planned. The ability to change midstream helped this small blip from becoming something larger.”

It made me wonder what small and medium sized businesses should do in their Social Media strategies.  Whilst the sheer numbers of potential ‘problem messages’ will be far less than for McDonald’s, the risk of reputation damage could be just as big.  How many have a contingency plan and how many have the resource to implement it if the worst should happen?

If a brand the size of McDonald’s with all their inhouse expertise, agencies and consultants can get it wrong, then so can any of us – the only options it seems to me are to have an actionable contingency plan or not take part in the first place.

Happy tweeting, posting and updating

Chris

As Business Link nears the end of its existence, it was interesting to read an article in the Sunday Times on 2nd  October discussing how well it worked.

What initially caught my attention was that the featured success story was one of our clients – Nick Wall who founded Tails Cocktails and through Business Link  was able to secure our marketing expertise and knowledge of the drinks industry.

So is it a good idea to get rid of Business Link?  On the negative side, it was often highly bureaucratic (anyone who completed a tender document or the select supply application will know what I mean), it definitely made some errors, and not all the advisors were great.

But as evidenced by the Tails example, when it got it right, Business Link had the capacity to make a big difference and help an aspiring entrepreneur make a start.  In the current environment of heavily restricted lending by the banks (if any at all), how many would-be business owners would relish the opportunity for free advice and some grant funding?

I’m left feeling that we might just have thrown out the baby with the bathwater – surely after nearly 20 years, there is enough experience, both internal and external to make improvements to the offering rather than simply close it down?  If the suggestion in the newspaper article turns out to be correct and government ends up replacing it in three or four years, will we really get something better, and how long will it take to recover the costs of closing Business Link (think of all the redundancies, office furniture …)?

What do you think?

Regards, Chris.

When I make chilli con carne at home I always put a bit of chocolate in it – the good quality dark stuff, not much, just one or two squares.  I think it makes a real difference to the taste, and it’s my ‘secret ingredient’.

Great businesses often have a secret ingredient – something that makes their product or service a bit different, gives them an edge over their competitors and gives their customers a reason to try it in the first place, stay loyal to it and ultimately recommend it to their friends, family and colleagues.

Most owners of small and medium sized businesses tell me that ‘word of mouth’ is very important to their business, especially in delivering good quality leads and enquiries – opportunities that they can convert more easily and profitably than those that come from other marketing activities.

So what makes ‘word of mouth’ marketing happen?  What makes a customer tell other people about a product or service?  It’s usually when their experience has been special, because that makes them feel good about themselves (“didn’t I make a good decision”) and is more likely to be interesting to the people they want to tell.

So to get more work of mouth marketing, I suggest we just need to find the chocolate to put in our chillis.  A good start point is to find out what customers think, perhaps with a simple and inexpensive customer survey.

Cheers,

Chris.

What’s the difference between strategy and tactics?  There are lots of great textbook answers to this question, but I’m not going to waste your valuable time quoting any of them, let alone adding to them with my own definitions.

The real difference, the only one that matters in the end, is the difference to the business that applies them – the difference in sales, costs and profit.

A major research study conducted over many years, with businesses of various sizes and operating in many different industries concluded that there is actually a critical difference.  To briefly summarise the findings, we need to break tactics into two groups – efficient and inefficient; and similarly break strategies into two groups – effective and ineffective.  This gives us four possible combinations for any business.

While the first two combinations are fairly predictable, the 3rd and 4th combinations are very interesting:

1. Effective strategies and efficient tactics – the ideal situation which generally leads to a thriving business.
2. Ineffective strategies and inefficient tactics – the nightmare scenario, which usually results in the demise of the business
3. Effective strategies and inefficient tactics – the study shows that in this scenario, the business will usually survive.
4. Efficient tactics and ineffective strategies – in this situation, the outcome is still the demise of the business

The only difference the study found between scenarios 2 and 4 was the rate at which the business died.  In other words, if the strategy is wrong, changing the tactics only delays the inevitable.

So what does this mean for marketing?  In simple terms, businesses that have the wrong marketing strategy are doomed, and changing the tactics (where they advertise, introducing new promotions, price reductions, updating the website etc.) will only change the speed at which it happens!

We work with many good businesses who recognise that years of changing tactics still isn’t bringing them the results they desire, providing marketing consultancy that gives their marketing real direction.

We’ve all heard the story about what consultants do – “they take your watch and tell you the time!”  I guess there’s another part that often gets added – “they charge you a fortune for it too”.  I’m not going to comment on how other consultants work, but wanted to share an experience from a couple of years ago with one of my clients which puts a slightly different slant on this.

I was engaged by a director of the company (I’ll call him Dave – not his real name) who ran the business day-to-day with his sister.  The business had been started by his parents some 48 years earlier and Mum & Dad were still helping out and ready and willing to offer advice to Dave and his sister.  Our project was to help them improve customer retention, cross sell other products and services to existing customers and create a new business development strategy.

All went well with the project – delivered on time, on budget etc. and Dave was very pleased with what we had done and was quickly getting positive results.  A few months after the end of the project I went to see Dave again to check how everything was progressing and he told me he had had a very interesting conversation with his Dad about the work we had done.  Dave had explained to his Dad what we had done and how we had done it, a large part of which involved interrogating their data, talking to their customers and then applying some robust thinking (albeit not ‘rocket science’!).

At the end of his explanation Dave’s Dad said “I’m really pleased with the results son, but not sure why we paid Chris all that money – I think we could have done that ourselves.”  Dave’s reply was “Yes Dad, we probably could have done it ourselves… but for 48 years we didn’t!”

I’ve just got back to work after a very pleasant break in Cornwall and felt the need to talk about two fantastic experiences during our holiday.

The cottage we stayed in has only just opened for bookings and yet was absolutely superb, surpassing all our expectations.  The owners were just next door, very helpful when we needed them, but not at all intrusive.  The location (Luckett, near Callington) was very quiet and relaxing, but still easy to get to all the beaches and attractions that we wanted to visit.  The cottage was very spacious and beautifully decorated and furnished – really making us feel comfortable.  The equipment was all first rate too.  if you’re looking for a quiet destination on the Devon / Cornwall borders drop me a line and I’ll send you the contact details.

We visited Launceston one day and were drawn to the Mad Hatters cafe which specialises in Gluten Free food – one of our daughters has Coeliac Disease and as a consequence has never had a Cornish Pasty before!  The owners were very friendly and I’m assured that the gluten free pasty was great.  if you order in advance you can arrange to collect many of their gluten free products to take away and/or freeze.  This was a delightful contrast with Padstow, where despite all the gastronomic efforts of Rick Stein, there was not a single gluten free pasty to be found.

Chris.

Have you ever started to do business with a company and then changed your mind due to the initial experience?  I’ve just been going through a change of bank for a business account and frankly the experience has made me seriously question the choice of bank.

For a small business account, I’m really not too concerned about the interest rate, or even the bank charges, but I do want to be reassured that the organisation managing my money is reliable, responsive, pays attention to detail and has good processes in place.

The experience to date has included:

• Essential forms not sent to me to transfer funds and set up online banking
• Bank manager not aware that the forms hadn’t been sent
• Returned forms going missing, despite being sent to the right address
• Transfer of funds taking 7-10 working days

I wonder if the irony of this poor first experience has even occurred to anyone at the bank -  from the small business manager up to the bonus earning ‘elite’ in the high-rise London office?  I also wonder how many other businesses shoot themselves in the foot in the same way – delivering such a poor initial experience that the potential customer is put off trading with them?

We’ve found that our mystery shopping programme which measures customer experience has helped several local businesses make significant changes to the way they treat new and existing customers, winning them more positive feedback and more importantly improving their bottom-line performance.

Cheers,

Chris.