1 While every effort will be made to run the advertised programme,Start Your Own Business Module 3 – Workbook Marketing and the Small Business What’s Your Idea and How are you going to sell it? All materials and contents made available to all participants may only be used for professional development in the context of this training course. Not to be copied, handed on or reproduced in any format. All material © 2012 McCormack Associates, TrainingPeople.Biz, New Ways of Working and SharpenYourSkills.com. Access to these materials implies acceptance of these conditions. Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing. John D Rockefeller While every effort will be made to run the advertised programme, Monaghan Local Enterprise Office and its contractor reserve the right to amend and vary content and subject matter without notice if circumstances require it.
2 10 Tips for Naming Your Business - Ref: startups.co.ukFor most entrepreneurs, the business name is the first thing they think about when building their business, and it’s also one of the most important. All great businesses have a clear, recognisable and enticing name, free of negative connotations and legal problems. To ensure you get the right name for your business, we’ve listed 10 top tips – five ways to approach the naming process, and five things to bear in mind during it. Here are the five ways to approach the task: Create your naming outcome Jon Platt, partner in branding agency? What If! Innovation, told us: “Before we generate a name we create a naming outcome, clearly defining the type of response a client is looking for when people see the name. “If they conjure up the images, feeling, breadth, sound, shape and association you are looking for, then you have got the name you need. The more tangible and precise your desired outcome, the easier it will be to spot the right name.” Hold a workshop A brainstorm session can be great for coming up with a business name, as it allows people to bounce ideas off each other without feeling they have to deliver the killer suggestion by themselves. But if you do decide to hold a workshop, make sure you invite the right people. Jon Platt told us that “there are people who love words and language, and they are invaluable to a great workshop. Without them the session will be tortuous!” Role Play Try to put yourself into the mind of your target audience, try to think the way they think. Work through the types of responses you want from them, and then consider ways to elicit these responses. Get Feedback Once you’ve chosen your name, try and get feedback from as many people as possible before you formally commit to it. A name might sound brilliant to you, but they might spot negative connotations, grammatical errors, or simply point out that it sounds rubbish! Check it’s unique Before you decide on your name, you need to make sure no-one else is using it. Go to to check. Here are the five things you should consider: Niche Do you want to be associated with youthful excitement, or classical distinction? Is your brand local, or continental? Is it affordable, or reassuringly expensive? You need to think about what you want your brand image to be, and build your name around this. Acronyms Some brands, such as HMV and the AA, provide punchy, memorable acronyms; but if you’re not careful, you could end up with an acronym which is extremely unfortunate. So if, for example, you’re a food business thinking of calling yourself Succulent Tasty Delights, or a recruitment firm considering the name Amazing Recruitment Solutions Every day, you might want to think again! Search engines Is the domain name available? When people come to type their search into the search engine, will they be able to remember it? Come to think of it, will they be able to spell it? If they enter generic search terms, will your name come up? If your name is clear, simple and easy to spell, you’ll get more traffic from the search engines. And the more keywords you can think of around your name, the better. Future development You need a name which allows your business to expand and evolve; if your name is too narrow and specific, you’re tying your business down to a tiny market, and you won’t be able to build on it. Brand potential Can you create a memorable slogan around your name? Does it work well in a logo? Does it fit into a winning tagline? Your name needs to be malleable and suitable for a wide range of marketing avenues. If it’s not, you need to go back to the drawing board!
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16 How to Avoid Expensive Marketing MistakesBusinesses large and small are guilty of wasting marketing spend. Here Second Opinion Marketing explores the common pitfalls companies encounter and makes recommendations on how to avoid making expensive mistakes. Targeting Everyone and Reaching No-One Have you ever placed an advert or run a marketing campaign and received little or no response in spite of having a good product, well described? You are not alone. 9 times out of 10 the reason is simple – poor targeting or the scattergun approach. Think of a farmer sowing seed widely across his whole field, taking no account of whether the soil is fertile, stony or full of weeds. We’re not at all surprised when only some of the seeds take root and flourish. The same applies to promoting your business and its products – don’t waste valuable seed. If your marketing activity is indiscriminate – you haven’t decided exactly who you want to reach with your message and how best to reach them – you are unlikely to succeed and very likely to waste your investment in marketing. The key to success is knowing your customers and target clients really well. Imagine them sitting in front of you. What do they look like? How do they speak? What are they reading? Where do they socialise? What type of job do they have? What type of car do they drive? What influences them? Who’s opinion do they value? And if you are in the business-to-business arena think about the type of business you sell to – size, industry type, and decision-making process. But don’t forget it may be a business cheque you receive as a result of the sale but it’s an individual or at worst a group of individuals who make the decision – find out what motivates them. All of this will help with targeting because the clearer the image you have of your target audience the more likely you are to strike a chord with them. The most successful businesses have a deep understanding of the market they operate in and carefully segment that market. So rather than, for example talking about operating in the insurance market selling to UK adults, they segment down to motor insurance and understand the divisions in the market and motivation for buying which will be very different for example in the youth, new driver market to the over 40s new driver segment. In the first case the excitement of passing the test, buying a first car and a desire to obtain insurance cover quickly may result in a decision based on price and availability alone. In the second the potential customer may be more aware of a range of players in the market, and in fact may go to an existing supplier, for example the company they have their home insurance with. They are more likely to have an opinion and perceptions about insurance companies in the market. They may be more interested in the added benefits they can get, like breakdown cover, for added peace of mind. They will almost certainly have a better understanding of what they are buying and the type of things to look out for – excess penalties, named driver restrictions and so on. Obviously the way you would target the youth driver would be very different to the driver who’s over 40. The message would be different, as would the media you would use. Thinking through the segments of the market you are trying to target can prevent a lot of wastage. Having defined very clearly the target segments that you want to communicate with lets explore why you need to set SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and timely) objectives for all of your marketing activity. Not Knowing When You’ve Failed, Or Succeeded You wouldn’t spend money on a new piece of machinery or an accounts package without deciding what your business will gain from the investment. Make sure you treat your marketing investment in the same way. And don’t be vague or hide behind the fact that it is all too difficult – when planning any form of marketing activity you must set very clear, measurable targets or objectives and ensure you can measure results and response accurately.
17 Think about the type of response you might getThink about the type of response you might get. Do you want phone, fax or response? More importantly have you briefed all front-line staff to confirm with callers how they heard about your company or it’s products so that you can accurately monitor response to specific marketing campaigns. Are you looking for direct sales? That one should be easy to measure, but only if you can trace back sales from each difference source. There’s no need to over complicate matters here – too many businesses hide behind the fact that they’d need to invest thousands in complex computer systems to track response, this is rarely the case. Our advice is – unless you can measure and monitor results from your spend on advertising don’t do it. The next time you are approached with an unbelievable offer from your local business magazine or newspaper with a special rate for a ¼ page advert – stop and think. If I take this space what do I want to achieve? Who will be reading the publication? How many responses can I expect – don’t be over ambitious? Could I spend the same amount on other marketing activity and get a better result? The simple fact that you have thought these things through should improve your result. You know your market and you have decided how best to approach them and you will be carefully measuring the response you get. Now lets take a look at the more practical side of things – how to handle enquiries effectively. Generating Enquiries, And Then Ignoring Them All too often companies fail to handle enquiries effectively. Whether these enquiries are unsolicited, “free prospects”, or in response to adverts, website pages, direct mail or other promotions there are some key pointers to follow: Availability Make sure you have people on hand to answer the calls, receive face to face visitors, deal with web enquiries, fulfil mailing requests, return calls and arrange sales visits as necessary. And a really obvious point – if your advert will appear in the evening newspaper give serious consideration to manning the telephone outside normal working hours to deal with immediate response, and promote this fact in the advert. Staff Awareness Brief all staff, but especially front line staff. Show them the advert; explain where and when it will appear. Let them know how you want them to handle enquiries, do you want them to give out prices on the phone? Would you prefer them to send out full details or book an appointment for a salesman? Don’t forget to explain to them the importance of monitoring what has prompted the call so that you can measure and judge the cost effectiveness of your activity. Speed of Response Don’t delay in responding to enquiries. Generally people expect to receive information they ask for within 24 – 48 hours of their request. Personally if I a request for information I like to get at least an acknowledgement of my request by return – this message can tell me when to expect the information I’ve requested if it can’t be supplied immediately. Either way I don’t expect to wait more than a few days. Provided the customer’s expectations are managed and fulfilled they will be satisfied. Don’t go for false economies when sending out fulfilment material. A first class stamp looks as though you are interested as does returning a sales enquiry call within a few hours. Handle every new customer enquiry like it’s your first or your most important and you won’t go far wrong.
18 Points to Remember Make sure you: Keeping Customers – Don’t Let Yourself Down You might attract prospects to your business through advertising activity but it’s only through their experience with your firm that they will become a true customer, buying from you on multiple occasions and recommending you readily to others. Think about going out for a meal. The type of food you want to eat, location and the atmosphere you are looking for will affect your choice of restaurant but your choice will also be influenced by your experience of the restaurant to date or their reputation and your perception of the experience you might enjoy. Reputation will come from a number of factors: including company image, product performance, in this case how good the food is, and service standards, which goes way beyond whether the cutlery is clean. Once you’ve attracted a customer you want them to spend with you, and then to return and buy more in the future. Whether they do or not will be determined by their experience. The way customers are treated, the grooming of your staff, the approach they use with customers, their knowledge of your products – haven’t you ever ordered the most expensive thing on the menu because the waiter described it in such mouth watering detail? If the customer’s experience is a good one they will return, they’re likely to recommend you to others, and next time they may bring a party of people. If their experience is a bad one they are unlikely to give you a second chance and they’re likely to dissuade others from trying your restaurant. Having invested in promoting your company make sure the customer’s experience makes them want to return. Their first visit or purchase shouldn’t be their last. Make sure you spend as much time, energy and marketing investment keeping your existing customers, as you would trying to attract new ones. For many businesses this should be the only way they market their business, through referrals they will continue to grow their customer base with minimal investment. It is easy for us all to understand and appreciate the restaurant example – but the pointers and tips apply to any business. Understand the importance of the image and reputation of your company, especially the role that your staff play in creating, or destroying this image. Set and maintain clear standards, sometimes called values, and invest time and effort in making sure everyone in the business knows, understands and is prepared to live by these values. It’s one sure fire way to develop a sustainable competitive advantage because it’s one that others will find most difficult to copy. Points to Remember Make sure you: Understand your market and how to target your best prospects Set measurable objectives for all marketing activity Handle customer enquiries effectively, every time Provide excellent customer service, encourage repeat purchases and ask for referrals. This combined with a clear marketing plan setting out what you are trying to achieve will ensure you maximise your investment and generate better results from your marketing activity.
19 Guerrilla Marketing for Startups - Collis Ta'eed BlogWhen you’re low on cash you have to think differently When you run your own business – be it web or otherwise – it is a general rule that you need two things to accomplish any particular task, money and time. A lot of one means you need less of the other. If you had a lot of cash, you can just pay someone to do the work, whereas if you’re broke with all the time in the world, well…then you get creative. In the case of publicity and traffic generation, a lot of money means you can advertise, sponsor and pretty much bribe your way to celebrity (or infamy). If on the other hand like most start-ups you are short on money or just plain stingy then you’ll need to take a different tack, for this situation you’ll need a bit of Guerrilla Marketing. So before you run out to the local zoo armed with placards and bananas, let’s do a bit of definition work. Guerrilla Marketing is a term coined by author Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1982 book of the same name, and it simply means unconventional marketing and promotional activity on a shoestring budget. The name comes from guerrilla warfare not the gorilla ape, and is thus named because it’s a technique that is especially powerful in the hands of a small, agile business. Without a large budget, your primary tools and assets will be time and imagination. Rather than competing you will need to cooperate and leverage off others to strengthen your own position. Instead of buying your way in, you will need to create value for people in unconventional ways. In every case you will also mix up many different strategies to create your plan. Although every business and marketing situation will call for different and inventive strategies, here are some examples to get you thinking: Using a feature of your product to get publicity for its innovation or excellence When it came time to revamp the website for design agency Good Creative where I work, we thought long and hard about how to best use the design to market the site. Since CSS design blogs are so popular, we built the site using lovely, clean, table-less mark-up. While this has other, obvious benefits it also led to the site being listed in numerous CSS portals and generated thousands of visitors. Of course many of these visits were from designers coming no doubt, to pinch our ideas! But mixed in were many, many leads, and it cost nothing but a bit of extra time and care to make sure the design was done right. Giving away something for nothing There’s nothing that gets people interested quite like the idea of getting something for free. A common application of this idea is to give away a free trial or a no-cost subscription, thus lowering the so-called ‘barrier to entry’ – the initial time and cost it takes a user to adopt or use your product. While a free trial is a great thing to do however, it’s hardly Guerilla Marketing. A more inventive idea is to really give something away. Take for example 37signals who gave away an entire framework in Ruby on Rails producing no direct, obvious profits, but creating huge reserves of public goodwill, a large cache of dedicated supporters and a damn lot of publicity. Still we don’t all have frameworks to give away, at least I don’t. As an example of something a little less grand, when Internet Explorer began having the “Click to activate” issue with Flash movies, the portal Kirupa.com created a little tool that let designers type in their Flash movie clip name and details and in return generated some JavaScript. Not a particularly hard feat to accomplish, but for their target market it was very useful. As a result a legion of tech-shy designers would continually return to the site to use this tool giving Kirupa ample opportunity to entice them to use the site. So what you give away can be simple, but it must be valuable. It might be a tool, free assets such as code or images, a set of tutorials or all sorts of other things. As a well as being genuinely useful to your audience, it must also be totally free – not a ‘buy 5 and we’ll throw in a set of steak knives’, but actually free.
20 Guerrilla Marketing for Startups - Collis Ta'eed BlogThe gift of knowledge Writing and speaking are great ways to gain publicity for yourself and by implication your product or business. Naturally you will need to have something useful to say since no one wants to listen to gibberish. Nonetheless you will be surprised that what appears to be common sense to you, may be fascinating to someone else. The key to this method is sticking to your field of expertise. You may need to supplement your own knowledge with a bit of research and a dash of reference, but by writing in publications, sites, blogs and/or organizing speaking engagements and giving seminars you will not only gain publicity but build credibility. This may sound hard, but publications are often starved for good content and provided you write well and edit furiously there is no reason why you can’t get some work published. Make Friends That’s right, making friends isn’t just good for your social life, it’s great for your business too. After all if I had a penny for every time someone has said “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” then I’d have … at least 50 cents! As a warning, I am not advocating you try to push superficial friendship on people who just don’t want to know you. What I am saying is get to know the people in your industry, attend events, join communities, do favours, help others and you’ll be surprised what benefits you reap. Put on a show Organising an event, exhibition or competition is a clever way of getting a lot of publicity, though of all the ideas mentioned thus far; this is by far the hardest and most time consuming, so consider warned. Still with great toil comes great reward. Events such as conferences, seminars or exhibitions are fabulous as they are the sort of thing other people will want to publicise for you. If you can get through the stress of it all, you’ll gain credibility along with your publicity too. Though you might think there is a lot of financial outlay to putting on a show, you can through the use of sponsors, entrance charges and so on even turn this into a profitable enterprise. To Conclude… These five examples should have gotten a few ideas popping in your head and I would encourage you to be as inventive as possible in your strategies. The possibilities and rewards for your efforts are large. The best thing about Guerrilla Marketing is that when executed successfully, it is a far more powerful way of reaching out to your audience than throwing advertising at them. For this reason, it may even be worth pursuing these techniques even if you do have the money. I can’t say that it will be easy, heck I’ll straight out tell you that the more work, time and effort you are willing to put in the more successful you will be. Just remember the key to Guerrilla Marketing is to give people value, not perceived value, not run-on value, not discounts on your products, but real, genuine, bona fide value. Do that and you will be successful every time. Contact Information Monaghan Local Enterprise Office, Unit 9, M:TEK Building, Knockaconny, Monaghan Tel: Fax: (general enquiries)