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Browse every published article connected to Helen Dowling, with exact attribution and full-archive search.
Articles
Browse every published article connected to Helen Dowling, or search within this exact expert archive.
Well, this article isn’t exactly about Yo Sushi! It’s about the fact that if you pay attention to the big companies around you, it’s very likely that you’ll find ideas that you can apply to your own business. Remember, big companies can afford to do things – they can afford to hire the best marketing consultants; the best design agencies; the best social media experts; the best advertising companies.
Many of the people we speak to currently use a marketing company that they may have been with for month or years and if they’re working well for you, then that’s great. However, more often than not, we find that the activities the current marketing company are doing don’t result in lead generation. The activities are more around social media, PR or writing blogs. These ‘awareness/brand building’ activities are great if that’s what you’re looking for, but if you really want meetings and appointments in the diary, then they won’t necessarily result in this.
How many times have you read something – maybe on a website or in a sales letter and thought “that doesn't make sense” or found it hard to concentrate because the way it was written wasn't very interesting? Well, let me tell you something. When I first started my business, that’s how the information that I wrote down used to be all the time. It was full of jargon, didn't make sense and was written in business English – great for reports, but not for getting the sale in through the door.
When you’re frustrated with marketing and you just need customers fast, here are some simple and quick things you can do to bring new customers in. 1. Talk to your past clientsr Have you kept in touch with your past clients? Maybe they’re looking for your products and services right now. Drop them a line (either by phone, email or post) just to see how they’re getting on. When you’re looking for customers fast, your past clients are often a great source of leads. 2. Analyse what’s worked in the pastr
So, you’ve joined Linkedin on the promise that it’s a great business tool and you’ll definitely get clients from it, right? Now what? You know that clients coming from this medium won’t happen on their own, but what should you do next? This is such a common question – what should I be doing on Linkedin and more importantly how do I get business out of it? – that I thought it was important that I gave you some tips.
Do you have a marketing strategy in place? No, by this I don’t mean a marketing plan (although that’s great if you have one of these). I mean a marketing strategy – something that tells you end to end where each of your marketing fits in. When I talk to small business owners they usually tell me about various marketing activities that they have planned for their business. That’s all great and I’m not knocking that at all, but all this will do is bring you in potential customers for your business.
As small business owners, one of the things that we’re short on is time and particularly time to do marketing. Marketing is just one of those things that goes by the wayside when everything gets busy isn’t it? Here’s the problem though. If you only do marketing only when things gets are quiet and then don’t do any when you’re busy with other work, it will lead very quickly to peaks and troughs in your business. The trick to sorting this out is to do marketing all the time even when you’re busy. Not so easy if you don’t have any time though…. So how do we sort this out?
When I first started my business, I had a business mentor who told me the following quote. I’ve never forgotten it because it’s so true for many, many business owners. He said: “Show me an entrepreneur and I’ll show you a manic-depressant.” How true is that? One moment as a business owner, you can be on top of the world and nothing can go wrong. The next, you’re down in the doldrums thinking that a job could really be great right about now. And all it can take to change your mood is literally a phone call or an email.
Within the next week or so, offices across the country will be closing for Christmas and not re-opening their doors until 3rd January 2012. While that’s only a couple of weeks, no-one will really get going again until the second week in January, so it almost feels like there is a month off for everyone. Why is this and how can you stop it having a major impact on your business?
So, you’re thinking about outsourcing your marketing. You invite two or three potential suppliers into see you, all of which provide you with a quote…and then at some point you start asking yourself whether you should employ someone in-house instead. When you’re faced with this dilemma, it can sometimes be helpful to breakdown the advantages or using a marketing company vs employing in-house so here’s a quick comparison. • Experience
We're seeing some AMAZING results with our LinkedIn package and it's becoming really PREDICTABLE! In other words, we know that if we do x, then y, then z, it will lead to meetings and leads for our clients. How would you like meetings with Travis Perkins, Be ard Matthews, Edinburgh Council - all of which we've got just in the last week for our clients? Here's how our LinkedIn package works: • We will carefully research 20-40 target companies on LinkedIn for you every week; • We will send these over to you so you can check they are the right targets;r
Over the last few years, there have been lots of new ways to market and promote your business springing up. One of those ways is to create a blog for your business. A blog – short for web-log – is an on-line diary. You can set one up for free at www.blogger.com or for those who are more technically minded, set one up at www.wordpress.org. When you’ve set one up you can use it in whichever way you choose. Here’s some examples: Articlesr If you write articles (which are a great way to promote your business in their own right), you can post them in your blog.
Over the past few months, we’ve been working with a graphic designer company to revamp our brand. It’s taken a while to come to fruition but we got there in the end. Sometimes, marketing can be a bit like that too – you have a lovely plan and strategy in place, but for some reason, you don’t get the results you’re looking for. Frustrating isn’t it? However, when this happens at Exceptional Thinking, we never, ever give up – we know there’s always a way forward and we can get the results our clients are looking for.
The other night (after a very long week I hasten to add) my husband and I went to Prezzo, the Italian Restaurant Chain. Prezzo is a company that I really admire in terms of marketing, because they really have it spot on. Granted they have a huge marketing team and probably a large budget to boot, but there are some things that they do really well that you can implement in your business for free. So what do they do?
With only a couple of months left until the end of the year, a natural question that comes up is 'when do we call it a day?' For most business to business companies, they'll tell you that after the end of the second week of December there is really no point doing any marketing as no-one will be interested. Not only that, but there's no point marketing again until after the second week of January either; it's only then that businesses will start to wake up. Mmm – we're not sure we agree. In fact, for us December is no different from any other month.
How many times have you heard the phrase “Act like your business is worth £1m” and left thinking that although that would be nice, there is no way you could do that because you just don’t have the money. Me too! And then, the other day I reached an epiphany. By this phrase, people don’t mean to actually spend money like your business is worth £1m. What they mean is categorised by the word “ACT”. Let me explain what I realised.
Over the last few years, I’ve spoken and written in depth about following up with people and why I really do think that it is the most important marketing technique that you can do. But, I still see business owners struggling with following up with people. Case in point, I was speaking to a contact of mine who was a member of a networking group. He told me that every week he was giving potential leads to follow up with and dutifully sent them all an email.
You’d think with all the literature, research, evidence etc out there that small business owners would know who their target customers were and what their needs are. And yet, still I went to a networking event the other day and heard a lady say that she could help “everyone”. So, today I thought I’d turn the question around and ask who will you CHOOSE to work with? You see, in any business there are several different types of clients:
About a year ago now, I went along to a presentation on sales. The presenter advised us to think about people’s personalities when selling as four key animals – Monkeys, Lions, Dolphins and Elephants. Although all of us have a mixture of these personalities within us, we’re all dominated by one of them too.
Last week I sat down with a lady who wanted me to refer business to her. She was really lovely and we spent about an hour chatting away. But, although I would have liked to have referred business to her, I walked away from that meeting not really understanding what she did or how she could have helped people. Our conversation went something like this: She explained what she did. I replied with what I thought she did. She said no, she didn’t quite do that.
OK – I have to admit, by the time I got to Z in this series, I had to be a little bit creative about the title, but actually being able to get in the Zone is an important part of running a business. Let’s face it, we all have projects – things we want to do in our business to get us to where we want to be. And it’s really, really easy to let these things slide because other priorities get in the way.
We've been experimenting on LinkedIn recently, which has had some great results for our clients. We thought we'd share a couple of new techniques you might like to try. 1. The case study technique With this technique, you would find your target connections and send them an initial connection. Once they've accepted, send them a PDF case study through LinkedIn so they can see examples of your work. Your message with the attachment should tell them you've worked with similar companies and suggest a call with them to discuss this further.
How many times have you heard the phrase “Act like your business is worth £1m” and left thinking that although that would be nice, there is no way you could do that because you just don’t have the money. Me too! And then, the other day I reached an epiphany. By this phrase, people don’t mean to actually spend money like your business is worth £1m. What they mean is categorised by the word “ACT”. Let me explain what I realised.
How do you feel about writing your Christmas cards? For many, including the team at ET, it’s not something we particularly look forward to – it’s hard work and it takes ages. But when it comes to sending out something to your contacts and clients at this time of year are Christmas cards on your list? When we’re talking to our clients, we often find this is an area up for discussion; exactly what do you send to your contacts and clients at Christmas?
Direct Mail, otherwise known as sending letters through the post to prospective customers is now pretty much a dying art. By many business owners, sending letters has been replaced by emails – can’t say I blame them really. After all, emails are cheaper, quicker and you can see who has opened it and read it. Why wouldn’t you use emails? But, there are still some business owners who do use direct mail as a marketing technique.
Yesterday I had an 8.45am appointment with the Dentist. Definitely not my favourite place to go and definitely not at that time in the morning. My husband and I arrived for our check-ups promptly and at 8.45am exactly I was shown into the chair. After a quick look around and an announcement that everything was fine, I went back out to the waiting room. And that is when the magic happened. I don't mean literally here; Harry Potter did not appear or anything like that. But that is when the systems took over.
I think there`s a part of us that is attracted to the bright, shiny, marketing ideas, strategies and concepts that have sprung up in recent years. Gone are the days of good old-fashioned, religious calling through the phone book. This has been replaced by social media, webinars, podcasts, instagram, what's app - and I'm sure many more things to come. Or have they? The methods may have changed, but we have found and consistently proved that good old-fashioned consistency is still very much in existence.
This week, I wanted to address a question that I get asked by many small businesses. How much information is appropriate to give away for free? Most of us get asked to give away a fair amount of information – from information that we choose to provide (like this article) to people contacting us and asking us to answer questions for them to people blatantly meeting us and picking our brains. So, what’s ok to give away for free and what’s not? Well, the answer is that it’s very much up to you and your business.
When I first started Exceptional Thinking, just about everybody told me that I should do some advertising and to be honest, that’s what I thought I should do too. After all, that’s what businesses do to promote their products and services don’t they? So, dutifully I advertised. First in a business magazine that resulted in nothing, then in a local community magazine – again nothing and then finally (I was learning my lesson at this point) in the local paper. Nothing there either. By this point, I was getting a little frustrated with marketing.
Over the last year or so, lots and lots of new ways to promote your business have appeared. Some of these were there before, but they’ve now become mainstream and have opened the doors for smaller businesses to compete with larger businesses for the first time.
Why should you bother doing any marketing during July and August? After all, most people are away on holiday aren’t they? No one is really around so there doesn’t seem to be much point in doing a lot of marketing. You might as well just have some time off and take things a little bit easier. Well, I’m here to argue that this common assumption is wrong and thinking in this way could actually be extremely detrimental to your business come the Autumn. Here’s why I’m arguing this point.
It’s very interesting how opinions have changed over the last few years in marketing about what your free giveaway should be. I don’t mean the format it should take (i.e report, e-book, newsletter etc), but what the topic should be and the type of people it should attract. I know I’ve certainly changed my opinion. For the last few years in my business, I’ve been giving away 50 free ways to promote your business and you know what, it’s got results. I’ve attracted lots and lots of new contacts to my business and they’ve all been very happy to give me their contact details.
When people used to ask me why I wanted to achieve a particular goal in my business or get to a certain turnover, I never used to be able to answer them and I always came away from that interaction thinking the same thing: Why do you want to know my why? After all, I thought in my wisdom, it doesn’t really matter why I want to achieve those goals; the fact is that I do want to achieve them. Hmmm. I have to say that I have drastically changed my mind and here is the reason.
There is usually a time in any business where you think it might be useful to ask your customers what they think and get their opinions. This is particularly useful if you’re considering launching a new product or service and want to know whether people are likely to buy it. So if you do want to find out what your customers are thinking, what’s the most effective way to do this and what sort of questions should you be asking?
I know in my own business that I ALWAYS do better each month if I set some targets for my marketing. If I’ve got goals to aim for, I know where I am and I can try to achieve them. So my targets for this month for instance are: • 1 x meeting in the diary every week • 1 x new client every week • 1 x networking event every week Because I’m clear on what I’m striving to achieve, I can aim for these and know whether I’ve done them.
Whenever I recruit for a new member of the team, I usually don’t ask for someone with marketing experience, but more for someone who is organised and has good admin skills. Why? Because the vast majority of marketing I personally think is admin based and about being organised. Think about it: • Making calls to potential clients and following up • Sending out emails • Creating newsletters • Writing brochures, literature etc • Following up after networking events
Thinking about sending out a sales letter to your contacts this year? Before you do, stop and put in place some things that will prevent you from making some of the basic mistakes that sales letters tend to have in them. 1. Being too shortr
I came across a very interesting formula the other day, which was shared by a sales guru based in the US called Lisa Sasevich. She was talking about the fact that when many of us talk about what we can do for customers, we concentrate on how we can deliver the product or service and not on what the results are. I completely agree. Let’s face it, we’re all taught to concentrate on features and benefits and this inevitably leads to us talking about what we do for customers. We’ll say things like:
Although you might not think that getting payments from clients is anything to do with marketing, I would completely disagree. Because I think that there is nothing more demoralising that celebrating getting a new client and then finding that they do not pay. It can make you feel very low and be very stressful, which of course is not the ideal frame of mine to do more marketing or get more clients. So, knowing how to get payment out of a client is a vital part of your business and of your marketing. How then, do you set up your business to get payments easily out of customers?
It seems that business owners out there are finding it harder and harder to stay in touch with their customers. Consistently when I ask small businesses to rate themselves at following up, they always say that this is where they are weakest. Actually, there are tons of ways to follow up and stay in touch with your customers and your contacts - well five anyway. Many people let fear get in the way because they don’t like picking up the phone, but just think of all the other ways to follow up…
The other day I was speaking at a conference and was inviting delegates to ask me anything they wanted to know about marketing. One of the audience asked an interesting question – “Is Cold Calling dead?” They’d been along to a social networking seminar on the same day and the presenter had made this bold statement so the delegate naturally wanted to know what my response to this question would be. So, I’ll tell you what I told him – no, I don’t think cold calling is dead, but like any marketing method, cold calling cannot be taken in isolation and expected to do all the work.
Over the years, I’ve worked with many small business owners who are often put off from doing a task because they feel they need to have everything in place before they can move forward. Take one client who wanted to run some workshops for her business. Sounded like a great plan, but she didn’t want to do any marketing for them until she had completely planned out the workshop and knew exactly what the presentation would look like. Another contact didn’t want to do any marketing for their business until their website was in place – even though it could potentially take months to do.
I try not to write too much on market research and understanding your customers and your competitors – while it’s important, it’s not what most of you want to hear. Most small business owners simply want to know how to get more customers and don’t necessarily care how this comes about. But what if I told you that having an understanding of what goes on around you can literally double or triple how many customers you actually get?r
In business, one of your key roles is to spot opportunities that can give you the advantage and help you stay ahead of the competition. Sometimes, it can be hard to tell what these opportunities are as they’re not always obvious, but it’s important that you’re aware of them rather than letting them pass you by. Here are my top five ways of spotting the opportunities that are all around you in business: 1. Pay attention to what other people do.r
Xenophobia is the fear of strangers or foreigners so this article is all about turning strangers into friends into customers and it’s something that you’re going to have to do if you want to succeed in your business. You’re going to meet people all the time – whether it’s from networking, on the internet, through making calls or through having a press release appear in the local paper. And some of those people we won’t know and they won’t know us. So, how do we turn them from complete strangers to someone who knows what we do?
With December well underway and Christmas just around the corner we thought it was only fitting that our client of the month is a business that really knows how to get into the festive spirit! The Gardeners Arms is a free house dog and child friendly pub offering home cooked food based in the village of Alderton near Cheltenham in Gloucestershire. However, the word ‘pub’ doesn’t really tell people anything about what they offer so here’s how we’ve been helping them to spread the word:r
Working with our clients and getting to know them better also means we get to hear about their successes and achievements. When you work together with a client on their marketing strategy, it’s always great to hear that this is having the desired effect. However, we felt we needed to do more to tell everyone about it. That’s why we’ve introduced a new feature to our blogs – our client of the month – to showcase our clients’ successes. Our first client of the month is Westfield Patterns, a thermoform packaging manufacturer based in the UK. Here’s their story:r
With December well underway and Christmas just around the corner we thought it was only fitting that our client of the month is a business that really knows how to get into the festive spirit! The Gardeners Arms is a free house dog and child friendly pub offering home cooked food based in the village of Alderton near Cheltenham in Gloucestershire. However, the word ‘pub’ doesn’t really tell people anything about what they offer so here’s how we’ve been helping them to spread the word:r
Working with our clients and getting to know them better also means we get to hear about their successes and achievements. When you work together with a client on their marketing strategy, it’s always great to hear that this is having the desired effect. However, we felt we needed to do more to tell everyone about it. That’s why we’ve introduced a new feature to our blogs – our client of the month – to showcase our clients’ successes. Our first client of the month is Westfield Patterns, a thermoform packaging manufacturer based in the UK. Here’s their story:r