aardvark marketing consultants

In over 25 years of work, I have ‘learned’ about time management on many occassions, but still find myself needing to be reminded of the fundamentals and shed the bad habits that have crept back in to my working methods.

I was lucky enough on Friday to attend a Strategic Management workshop run by Sandler Training in Birmingham titled “Managing Your Time Effectively”.  Rather than focussing on techniques for diary management, making meetings run to time etc. it took a ‘bigger picture’ view of how we actually divide up our time in our role as business leaders.

Using the Urgent / Important model, and Stephen Covey’s habit of “First things first” we were introduced to four boxes:

1. Necessity – things that are both important and urgent e.g. crises, deadline-driven projects and last-minute preparations.
2. Quality and personal leadership – important, but not urgent e.g. preparation and planning, relationship building
3. Deception – urgent but not important  e.g. interruptions, some meetings, popuar activities, “pressing” matters
4. Waste – Not important or urgent e.g. trivia, junk mail, ‘escape’

While activities in the first box cannot be ignored, we can trap ourselves into spending too much time here and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – eventually everything important will become urgent and end up in this box.

The third and fourth boxes represent a major opportunity – if we delegate work in box 3 and eliminate as much as possible in box 4, we can free up time to focus on the second box.  This is the area that makes the real difference in the long term – time spent in box 2 moves us closer to our goals and also reduces the number of activities that drift into the first box which gives us even more time to focus on box 2 and so on …

What does this mean for marketing?  A couple of thoughts struck me.  Firstly, how is our marketing effort divided between these boxes?  How much waste, deception and necessity as opposed to quality and leadership?  Are we planning and preparing thoroughly or just ‘putting out fires’?

Secondly, within the wider business context, where does marketing fit?  Which box would SME business owners and directors put marketing in?  I would argue that it should be a box 2 activity – it is rarely urgent and important, but should always be important; however, I suspect there are plenty of business owners who currently see it differently.

Time to go,

Chris

Yes, the moment you avid readers have been waiting for!  The third and final installment of my thoughts on Word of Mouth Marketing – how do we make it work harder for our businesses?

The first step is to understand what is happening right now – what is being said about your business?  Can you identify a good referrer for your business and ask them how they do it – what do they say, how do they decide who to talk to etc.?

In the online world, there are a number of tools that can help us find out if we are being talked about – Google Alerts is an easy to use and free tool and there are others that comb social media platforms too.  My advice is to start small – set up a few alerts, see what they produce and then build up slowly or you may be overwhelmed with information.  Of course, you don’t have to just look at your own business – alerts can be used to find out what is being said by / about the competition, customers and prospects too.

A recommendation scheme is well sort considering – if it’s good enough for brands like Sky TV, it might just work for you too.  It can be a very powerful way of encouraging good referrers to keep doing it and convert good intentions into actions for others.  A word of warning – don’t confuse a ‘thank you’ to a referrer with a sales incentive!  We’re not trying to get people to do something they wouldn’t be happy to do, just help them and recognise their support with a token gift.

Consulting customers can often be a catalyst for Word of Mouth marketing.  Inviting customers to feedback and or asking their opinions can remind them about your brand and make them feel more involved – all key factors in getting talked about and recommended.

Following on from this is the simple, but often overlooked gathering of testimonials, recommendations and endorsements.  It’s not quite as strong as direct communication from one customer to another, but providing a good bank of customer feedback and reviews is probably the next best thing.  The two key factors in getting testimonials are asking (how many of us just don’t ask our customers?) and making it easy.

What could you do to build word of mouth marketing for your business?

Chris

Even those who don’t follow politics closely will have stuggled to avoid the media coverage of this week’s council elections and the phenomenal growth in share of the vote for UKIP.  Now don’t worry, I’m not going to get all political on this blog, but in the aftermath of the election results I’ve heard a few phrases (many of which I’ve heard more than a few times  after election results) and it struck me that I’ve heard some of them used in a business and marketing context too:

“We need to learn the lessons”

Well, when what we expected to happen didn’t happen, then clearly we got something wrong and it would be wise to work out what it was and learn from it.  Of course, sometimes it isn’t that what we expected to happen didn’t occur, it’s more that what happened isn’t what we hoped for.  Perhaps deep down what actually happened was excatly what our heads told us – we just didn’t want to listen.  Similarly, if we set out to ‘learn the lessons’, then we had better have an open mind to what we are going to see, feel and hear – it might not be pleasant!

“they are full of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”

The political arena does seem to like knocking the competition, perhaps because our politcal system is essentially adversarial.  There are of course some successful examples, one of the most notable probably the ‘Labour isn’t working’ Saatchi and Saatchi Conservative campaign that swept Mrs Thatcher to power in 1979.  However, there are plenty of examples where words have come back to bite the speaker too.  Personally, in business I’m not a fan of attacking the competition – at best we create demand for alternatives and in most markets there are plenty in addition to our own brand.  If we’ve won or paid for the opportunity to say something to potential customers, I would much rather talk to them about my brand than my competitor’s.

“We didn’t get our message across”

Otherwise known as “it’s the customer’s fault”.  If only they really understood how good my product or service is or if they had thought properly before they made their decision, we would be market leader.  Well, I think it’s well established that people buy (or vote) for their own reasons, not for ours.  If we don’t understand them and their reasons and/or can’t position our offering in a way that is relevant to them and their situation, then perhaps it’s more to do with us than them?

“It’s a protest vote”

And of course it might be.  But when does a protest become a movement?  When does an occasional act of disloyalty to our brand become a lost customer?  How many months does a customer have to go without buying from us to become someone else’s loyal customer?  Can we even spot changes in individual customers’ behaviours in the mass of sales data?

As the main parties (all four of them) continue to reflect on Thursday’s results, are we reflecting on our business results?  If we took our last sales period as a customer vote – what would we conclude?

Chris

Back to Word of Mouth Marketing – what are the challenges and how do we make it work for our businesses?

How many times have we heard a satisfied customer say “I’ll be happy to recommend you to my friends / family / colleagues”, felt great and then months later realised that we haven’t seen any of these potential new customers?  Why does this good intention fail to materialise?

Let’s start by assuming that the comment is genuine – there’s not much we can do about people who are intentionally misleading us.  Some of the common reasons businesses don’t get the results from Word of Mouth Marketing that they expect are:

• The message is wrong – it creates the wrong expectation, or misses key points
• The timing is wrong – it happens at the referrers convenience, not when we need the business, or it happens too late – the referrer only finds out that their friend needed a recommendation after they have bought something else
• The audience is wrong – our referrers are talking to off-profile people
• They just forget to do it

The first three can all be grouped under one heading – “Out of our control”.  Unlike most of our marketing activity, we don’t know who our referrers are going to recommend us to, when they are going to do it or what they are going to say.

However, there is a big plus in all of this – the message will be in their words, which makes it more believable; they are talking to people they know, who are more likely to respect their opinions; and they are talking to them at a time that is relevant to their audience.

So, if we know how and why Word of Mouth Marketing works (see part 1) and why it can fall short of our excited expectations, what can we do to make it work better and deliver the rewards we desire and deserve?

Well, you’ll have to wait for part 3 next week …

Chris

At our marketing club this week, we were focussing on Word of Mouth Marketing – how it works; why it works; the challenges it brings; and some tactics to make it work harder.

At first glance it may seem a little counter-intuitive that in an age of highly sophisticated marketing  tools and techniques, word of mouth is arguably more important than ever, but a number of recent studies have shown that:

• The opinion of friends, family and trusted sources is the most important factor influencing any individual’s decision
• 10% of the population have the greatest influence over the other 90%
• Messages with a strong emotional connection and independence from the marketer are most likely to get through

In their book “Face to Face”, Ed Keller and Brad Fay claim that 90% of consumer conversations are held off-line rather than on-line and that pound for pound these are also more valuable conversations.

So why is this happening? Well here’s three possible factors:

• Breakdown of trust – when MPs fiddle their expenses, newspapers hack people’s mobile phones, utility companies lie to us on our doorstep and we don’t even know what is in our burgers, consumers are becoming less trusting of brand communications
• As choice increases, the risk of making a bad decision increases and ‘safety in numbers’ becomes more tempting.  Does knowing that “80% of people who viewed this product bought it” make it a better product for me or just reduce the likelihood of ridicule and regret
• In an increasingly globalised world, branded products, services and providers are becoming more distant from us and try to fit us into their segmentation model, while people we know (and respect) are more likely to truly understand our needs and priorities

Whatever you believe about the reasons, no-one seems to dispute the potential value of Word of Mouth Marketing.  We just need to understand it and find a way to make it work for our businesses.

More in part 2…

Chris

I’ve just read an interesting article by David Wethey, founder of AAI, writing for the Marketing Society.  He offered 5 tips on how to make decisions which sounded pretty good to me.  I’ve summarised them below with a few of my own thoughts added:

1.  Beware the obvious – sometimes the simple answer is wrong, but we do learn from our mistakes.

2.  Avoid information overload – David likens data to fine wine.  As he puts it “too little and you will be miserable; too much and it will cloud your judgement!”  Data only becomes valuable when we put it to use.

3.  Decision making is like exercising – the more we do, the easier it gets and the better decisions we make.  It’s also a good idea to warm up with simpler decisions, before tackling the heavy stuff.

4.  Focus on downsides, not upsides.  We very rarely get surprised by unexpected upsides and even if we do, it’s unlikely to make us regret our decisions.  Downsides are a completely different story – hard to spot (remember the law of unintended consequences) and potentially very dangerous.  Much more likely to give rise to the “if only I’d known …”

5.  Success comes from making decisions – not fudging them.  When we confront things and make a change we create the potential for a better result.

If I were to add a 6th tip it would be “R&R”, no sadly not putting up our feet – Record and Review.  Things can change rapidly, and it can be hard to look back objectively on what we knew when we made a decision.  Reviewing our decisions and the consequences should help us make better decisions, learn which data and people help us make the best decisions and keep a balanced perspective on our decision making.  It’s easy to dwell on our ‘bad’ decisions, and forget all about the good ones – recording the decisions we made, the background to them and their outcomes will improve our confidence and performance.

You decide

Chris

It was bitterly cold, windy and snowy this morning at 6.15am when I left Worcester to go to a business breakfast meeting in Solihull. The M42  traffic was slow; the slush in the outside lane was dangerous and so I was stuck behind ‘white van man’ crawling my way towards my destination. On leaving the motorway the quieter roads were treacherous and my car skidded at every turn. When I finally arrived an icy blast greeted me walking from car to hotel entrance and the deep slush ensured that my feet got a good soaking. Of course I’m only human, so the thought  that this was not a good use of my time did cross my mind!

It was very fortunate that the welcome and the cup of tea were both warm and the speaker inspirational. Fiona Cohn from the Time Saving Experts was explaining about how many business owners do not make the most of one of their most precious resources – time.

I’d like to share her expertise with you. These are the commonest ‘time hurdles’ that, for many of us busy business owners, get between us and sucessfully accomplishing our goals and aspirations.

• Failure to plan our priorities and then focus on them
• Interrruptions – incredibly between 4 and 20 minutes is wasted as we try to get our concentration back to our tasks after an interruption
• Multi-tasking – this is the ‘self-imposed’ interruption according to Fiona. (“To do two things at once is to do neither”, Publius Syrus)
• Being unable to say “no” to others
• Procrastination (although we should allow ourselves short pauses to gather our thoughts)
• Inability to delegate, outsource or automate processes, preventing us from focusing on the tasks only we are qualified to undertake
• Trying to do too much, and not doing anything to a high standard
• Being too hard on ourselves when we need to allow enough breaks and rest time

Of course, we are all different personalities, work in different businesses and probably each of us have our own favourite time wasting strategies which keep us safe in our ‘comfort zone’. But if the late Stephen Covey is right and “the key is in not spending time, but in investing it” and if we are regularly falling into one of the above traps perhaps it really is time we took action.

We just need to find time to do the review exercise in our busy schedules……

Gill

I know it’s a bit of a cliche, but sometimes a cliche is the best way to say something.

When is the best time to write a marketing plan? Maybe at the start of a new financial year, or perhaps a couple of months before the new year when there is time to get the plan agreed and implementation underway and make a flying start to the year.  Maybe it’s best to do it in a quiet time – summer holidays, or over Christmas and the New Year?

I think you’ll find that when the (theoretically) best time for writing that marketing plan comes along there will be lots of other things to do too.  And in amongst the list will be some URGENT stuff that just has to be done right now.  For most of us, urgent not only needs doing now, but it’s easier than the important (non-urgent) things on our to-do list.

Scarcity of resource is a constant challenge in business, and especially in the exciting, growing businesses – there’s never enough money to make the investments we know we ought to make and never enough time to do all the things we should do.

I suspect that one of the key differences between businesses that sustain and increase growth and those that don’t is finding the time and money to do the important, rather than keep putting it off until it trips us up.  Sometimes that might even mean consciously not addressing the urgent (especially if it’s not actually important)!

So to return to the question – when is the best time to write a marketing plan?  NOW – not tomorrow, next week, next month, after the current crisis is over, when the new recruit arrives … as the guys at Nike say “Just Do It”.  Find a way and get it done; you know it makes sense!

Chris

I met a sucessful business owner this week who said this to me. My immediate  – shocked – reaction was to fear that this might put marketeers in the same category as estate agents, investment bankers, second hand car salesmen, journalists and politicians in terms of our public perception.  Sat next to me I saw a talented, ambitious, innovative owner of a growing IT business, who had received some marketing help in the past, but who hadn’t been well advised. Currently his business was not measuring the implementation, effectiveness and return of the marketing investment he was making.

Of course, we are all, as business owners or directors, surrounded by a plethora of companies who offer marketing services, whether “web and online marketing”, “social media marketing”, “telemarketing”, “advertising and marketing”, “PR and marketing”, “design and marketing”  etc etc etc.  We are certainly not short of choices for investment in our own business growth.  In my experience, decision makers often feel confused and spoilt for choice which makes it easy for them to be ‘sold’ the latest, greatest, new fangled marketing gimmick.  Sadly this can then often lead them to regret their choices when the promised land of increased sales fails to materialise and causes a consequential lowering of their trust in marketing professionals.

It would be easy if we all had a slot machine called “Marketing”  into which we could insert our £1 coins, press the button and it would churn out a predicable stream of potential new customers with high potential profit margins for the sales team to contact.  Unfortunately, the real world isn’t like that.  To implement marketing effectively a business needs a planned, realistic and  researched marketing strategy, which can be implemented on time and on budget.  Only then can the results be reviewed and refined at regular intervals and an understanding of how to improve our return on investment acquired.

An essential and integral part of that plan should be which KPI’s to monitor.  Anything less and it isn’t marketing.  Anything less and we have sold our businesses short.  Anything less and we risk tarnishing our industry’s reputation.

Happy marketing

Gill

“I rely on my gut instinct” or “It just felt right” is often the response we get when we ask people why they made particular choices. As one researcher, Wendy Gordon, has been finding out, marketeers who make decision-making more complicated may not get the results they desire.

To illustrate the point she refers to an experiment in which ordinary consumers and food experts were asked to give their opinions about jams they liked. Here’s what happened:

• Jam tasting experts were asked to rank 45 strawberry jams in terms of quality.  Five jams across the quality spectrum were then selected.

• A sample of non-trained people was asked to taste and then rank these five jams in terms of quality.  The experts and the ordinary consumers placed the five jams in the same order.

• A second  sample  of non-trained people was selected.  They were instructed to taste and to rank the five jams but at the same time to write down the reason for liking or disliking each one.  This group placed the jams in a different preference order.

So this  second sample group became overly rational and conscious of tiny irrelevant jam details to explain their ranking instead of relying on their gut feeling for preference. Thinking and analysing too much altered their judgement and led to a different result.

Clearly asking people to explain why they behave or think as they do is potentially downright misleading. Yet the majority of marketing and insight management continues to make decisions based on research that reports consumers’ reasons why. Time and time again, people’s ‘reasons why’ do not lead to effective marketing strategies. We may think we are being more sophisticated by asking for a rational choice but we risk skewing the results because we are missing out on the initial emotional reaction.

As a minimum, we need to make sure we capture the instinctive reaction first, before we try to explore why.  Perhaps the real clue to ‘why’ comes from understanding the consumer better and the situations in which they make choices – if we really can ‘stand in their shoes’ we may be able to understand their decision making much better than asking them to explain something they don’t really consciously think about too much.

Food for thought?

Gill