Marketing Content Assets – How Valuable?

• Who would watch your company videos? What ideas would grab them? What about cinematic quality?
• How’s your photography? When was the last time you had a professional photographer in for a few hours or a day?
• Does your graphic designer really understand your business and connect concepts visually?
• Are you excited to share links to your website? Do you have landing pages that actually produce leads?
• Is your website found through customer-centric keyword searches?
• Who in your organization can write to convey your value proposition concisely and with flair?
• Does your agency really understand you and what’s important to you, your customers and your team?

Affordable High-Quality

See the Content

The post What does your marketing content say about you? appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

First of all, and from my experience, small business owners are notorious for treating marketing budgets with a bit of disdain instead of confidence. This is because marketing is seen as a discretionary expense item when it’s really an operational investment.

Managing Your Growth

Working with the right team, approach, and budget, marketing dollars can literally be your throttle for positive results in your business. Look at marketing budgeting like driving your car and using the gas pedal. In our analogy, gas = dollars.

Follow me on this road trip…

1. When you start out, you hit the gas. (Robust brand identity and awareness campaign.)
2. As you get up to speed you can ease up a bit but keep your foot on the gas to maintain a good cruising speed. (Product advertising and promotions for managing growth.)
3. When you see a hill coming you get ready to give it more gas and then hit the pedal as you reach the incline, and more on steeper hills. (Responding to new competition, lower industry demand, recession, PR problem, etc.)
4. When over the crest of the hill you can ease off the gas, especially when going downhill. (Successful campaigns deliver positive and sustainable results.)
5. When back in the flats, more gas is needed to stay up to speed. (Competitive advertising and promotion to keep business steadily growing.)

The healthiest way to apply your marketing budget in a highly competitive landscape is to spend more when revenues decline, which may seem counterintuitive at first but really isn’t when you think it through. Unfortunately, too many small business owners do the opposite when it comes to planning and budgeting for their marketing campaigns.

The No-Go Approach

I can’t put a number on how many times I’ve heard business owners say, “We’ll increase our marketing budget when business gets better and we can afford more on advertising.” Hmm… When is “when?” Or worse, I’ve heard, “How about you put skin in the game and do our marketing upfront, and then we’ll be glad to pay you a lot when we get the new customers.” EEEK!

This kind of thinking is the very reason these businesses don’t have enough capital to respond to changing and sometimes negative market conditions. They lose market share, stay small, and some of them ultimately close.

Follow the Leaders or be the Leader Yourself

Depending on your industry, you should be spending between 6% and 18% of total revenues on marketing. This is the spending range of the market share leaders in each industry.

So, if you are feeling a little pinch from the volatile economy or some noisy new competitors in your market, how do you respond? Do you wait until “business gets better,” or will you make your own brand roar louder and more resonantly by design?

If you want to get business moving faster and in the right direction, get intentional and hit the gas. We’ll keep your engine tuned.

The post Budgeting for Marketing: a metaphor that works! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Holding off on launching a great ad campaign is like keeping your beautiful, prized sports car locked in your garage to avoid people seeing and admiring it. That makes absolutely no sense!

This is what too many small business owners do to their would-be customers when it comes to branding and advertising. They keep them in the dark by doing the next easy or “urgent” thing on their plate instead of investing in marketing and following through in the right media channels.

How do I know this? Personal experience owning a business. Plus, seeing firsthand what makes campaigns either fizzle or be successful.

Why do so many small business owners get cold feet when it comes to executing a great advertising or branding campaign that will help them grow? Simple, they don’t have confidence that it will work or return a profit. They’re afraid to fail, and some are even afraid to succeed!

Two Marketing Fear Factors

• If you’re afraid of failure, you probably don’t really believe in your own value proposition.
• If you’re afraid of success, you probably don’t trust yourself or your team to follow through on delivery to new customers.

If either is the case, you may need to address some operational or capacity issues. But of course, this isn’t you!

The Secret to Campaign Success

While no marketer can claim, “spend X and your ROI will be Y,” there are keys to consistently building and increasing results from your marketing campaigns. It’s a matter of open and constant communication.

If enough time goes by between communications, a Client and their Agency team can both get distracted, lose momentum, and execution suffers. This happens all the time.

The golden key to success is regularly attended meetings with a committed team. All you really need are a campaign, a calendar, and commitments.

Alternatively, software can help solve this common client-agency issue. In fact, marketing automation technologies are beginning to replace the traditional agency model for certain industries such as local home services.

Choose Partners and Tools

Whichever way you prefer to work, whether with human experts or keystrokes, have at it! Your brand and promotional messages are worthless if they stay parked on a static website or languish in a box of brochures.

Take action. Get the word out. Promote your value. Get some help. What are you waiting for?

The post Great Marketing Campaigns Get Out! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Do more marketing.

Yes, it is that simple and now you may think you wasted time opening this article, but read on. You’ll appreciate the message if you have an open mind.

When I say “do more” I’m specifically talking about doing more of what works, not necessarily about increasing budgets. And, if your budget is too low for what you need to accomplish, then you need to seriously ask yourself why that’s so. Is your business cash strapped? Is it fear of the unknown? Probably more the latter. Small business owners are usually afraid to spend money on marketing services unless they can envision and believe in a successful result.

Trust Yourself First!

Do you trust that your marketing team or agency has your best interests at heart? Do they understand what makes your business valuable to real customers?

Are you willing to commit time and expertise to your branding and content strategies? Will you task yourself and your team to keep pushing forward to move the needle?

Can you trust yourself to do what it takes as company leader to assure that your marketing efforts bring growth and profits?

Let’s be honest! I’ll start.

This gets a little personal. I’m the carpenter rebuilding my own house and the progress is frustrating! I need to live and work in this partially built structure (brand). While it’s way farther along than when we started, there are still some important renovations left unfinished.

• My website is old and needs a redesign. I attempted to freshen it up but that only revealed that I need to do it right, from the ground up.
• I need to apply better SEO practices to our own website. I know how, I just need to do it!
• We have a vast body of work. I need a Demo Reel Video to showcase what we actually do for our clients.
• I should hire a business administrator or virtual assistant to give me additional time for relationships & client strategy.
• I’ve started a dialog with a social media manager and need to hire the person sooner rather than later.
• I’ve held back on paid advertising for my company but recommend it to some clients.

You know, just like I do, that you need to prioritize your marketing efforts over dwelling in your comfort zones or putting out fires. If you need to work on your business rather than being buried in it, get some help.

Get help from someone with acute listening skills who quickly understands your business and target market and can effectively customize your marketing campaigns. Avoid getting shoehorned into someone’s go-to service template!

Your Turn…

Do you want to grow? Then do what growing companies do. Rise above the low-level noise of your competition and do more marketing. Help is available from a good listener with a successful track record.

The post What to Do if Marketing Stops Working appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Client – Pucuda Leading Edge

Whatever your business sector, the current pandemic slowdown is affecting you profoundly. It might be good for your company or it might be devastating but one thing is certain; you are feeling massive change underfoot and you know you must adapt.

I’m seeing some small businesses focus their energy on “cutting loss” and applying for government assistance or SBA disaster loans while some are converting their factories to make much-needed PPE for the public. Others are nurturing their key relationships and rebuilding their internal business infrastructures.

Rebuild Your Marketing Infrastructure

My clients are amazing. Most of them are stepping up their communication efforts right now, some of them big time! They have the foresight to position their businesses to be of indispensable service in their own communities immediately, and also to lead their industries during the inevitable recovery.

Image – catholicmedicalcenter.org

For example, a safety netting manufacturer in CT converted part of their factory floor to a mask production facility to make masks available for the public. Another client, a construction firm, was the first to answer the call from NH hospitals to his industry for N95 masks, donating his company’s entire stock of 200 masks to the medical team at Catholic Medical Center. This same client is working tirelessly right now on branding, marketing, PR, helping to write trade policy, and nurturing relationships with vendors, contractors, clients and business partners.

I have several other inspiring client stories but this post could get too lengthy. It’s likely that I’ll write about them in the near future.

What’s Happening Here at Home

Personally, I’ve never been busier in my life! But even though the current work is urgent and a bit stressful, I’m still using this passing crisis to reposition my business as the premium design and digital communication firm in our market with the resources and capability to scale! We’re currently in the process of building out my website’s service offerings and improving both the user experience (UX) and SEO. I even upgraded my website maintenance plan so my developer will make changes and improvements for me on-demand. This carpenter is building his house!

Most agree. Few actually do.

Client – SkiClinics.com

Remember that the best time to blow your horn is when the hall is quiet or your competition is distracted. Hmm… Here’s a thought:  People ordered to stay home or work from home are on their computers a lot. Guess where digital marketing reaches them?

Well, a past client got this message from one of my recent LinkedIn posts and decided it was time to promote his new online offerings in a big way, leading to an exciting new online marketing campaign. Check out the introductory newsletter. We’re helping to sell books and training sessions online. This new project has my juices flowing for a return to the good life we know is on the comeback!

The post That Marketing Thing – It’s now or never! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Furnish Facts and Photos!

If you want your campaigns and promotions to succeed, furnish the two things every marketing team or agency needs to do a bang-up job. Facts and Photos. That includes video. Of course, money can make the second thing happen but the facts (differentiated customer benefits) in most cases are contained in your head and in the experiences of your customers. It’s crucially important to articulate the factual or authentic benefit statements that set your brand apart from others.

“A picture is worth a thousand words” and so true! To learn what’s even more important about pictures when it comes to your brand, hop over to my article on LinkedIn to discover the plain truth about your marketing images.

The post Furnish Two Primary Marketing Assets! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

The more thinking and engineering that go into technology, products and services, the better they will perform (or be perceived to perform). But when it comes to marketing, sophistication and complexity muddy up your messages.

If you have an important message to convey, keep it simple, even if there are nuances. Why? Because the rest of us are mostly babes in the woods. Remember that only you think exactly the way you do and can perfectly connect your own dots. Your job is to simplify it all for the rest of us!

What about the nuances that really differentiate us, you might ask? If nuance is what differentiates your product or service, then your messages should be all about nuance. If a unique aspect of your business must be fully understood by your audience for them to take action, make it the primary message.

If complex, build your message in stages.

Be prepared to articulate every granular detail of your value delivery but save those details until your audience wants or needs to know them.

A Simple 4-Step Approach

If you need to make your message understandable and actionable, there’s a methodology you can use called AIDA (Attention – Interest – Desire – Action). To apply AIDA in your marketing messages and throughout your selling process, take your prospect through these communication stages:

Attention – Make your audience notice and listen. Make a bold, singular promise.

Interest – Once listening, build interest in how you will enrich your customer. Reveal some key features that will help them. You can further differentiate your offering with nuance and sophistication as long as your prospect wants to remain engaged. This is really the make or break stage because interest can be lost as quickly as gained. You must move them into wanting your product, or there’s no sale.

Desire – One way to know if your prospect has reached the “desire” stage is by the questions they ask. If the questions focus on recommended service levels, budget ranges, or what implementation involves, you and your prospect have reached the closing stage of the sale and are ready for…

ACTION – Unless your message is acted upon, why bother with branding, great web design and advertising? Why have salespeople? Your calls to action can be anything from e-commerce or contact links on your website to full-blown contract negotiations, depending on what you’re selling.

It’s best to hold your most sophisticated or complex product/service benefits for when you may need them, such as convincing a senior engineering team that your technology is superior. Give them the building blocks to decide for themselves.

Provide the Navigation

In marketing, the complex features do belong somewhere on your website with a clear navigation path. If your home and landing pages have a strong primary message, your visitors will go deeper to learn what they need to know, and hopefully place an order or call you with questions.

Content is gold.

You have limited mind space and attention spans to work with. Avoid muddying the water by keeping your initial marketing message simple. A powerful first impression can set the ball rolling from attention to ACTION faster than you expect.

The post Keep marketing simple! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Don’t follow the leaders down!

This is how I’m seeing things play out in business news as the year 2018 ends. I hope I’m wrong, but this stuff is predictable and I’ve closely studied economic cycles for more than 30 years. Negative chatter is contagious and creates “headwinds” against continued good economic times. But you can set your sails to tack against headwind and make a lot of forward progress.

I’m sorry to say this, but there are no executives of large American corporations who strike me as inspiring moral and ethical leaders. I cannot think of a single one. But there are numerous small business, independent enterprise and nonprofit leaders to whom I aspire and whose example I would like to follow, some I know personally. They are people bent on serving instead of controlling. These are people who stick with principles no matter what, and I’m talking about moral, ethical and economic principles. They enjoy enduring success.

The small business community needs to coalesce around the idea that the prevailing thoughts and decisions made by the leaders of large corporations and government (silent partners) often go against a stronger economy and the good of our country and society.

Do they still teach real economics?

If you subsidize something, you will enlarge it or encourage more of it. If you tax something, you will diminish it. This is a macroeconomics principle – an immutable law of economics.

If you serve your customer with value, you improve his position and therefore build more demand for your products. If you create more work or complexity for your customer and charge him for it in the process, you will damage him and lose his business. He will tell others about the bad experience as well. This is simple microeconomics which follows the macroeconomics principle.

Be solution oriented!

Why not put these immutable economic laws to work for our own businesses and multiply our numbers by example?

Any strong network of small business and enterprise leaders can work together in the markets and within their own companies to more effectively beat back negative economic forces, including politics and negative chatter aligned against them.

Put your best networking, service, sales and marketing game on, starting now!

Growth in 2019, 2020 and beyond is not only possible but probable if business leaders will get in the trenches with their people and demonstrate how much they care about the future. Leaders in great small businesses always do some heavy lifting with their teams to shore up conditions in the company and better serve customers. The also stay committed to their brand identities and work to build their reputations.

Business Growth Tactics for the New Year

In 2019, a strong leader will:

• Work closely with their salespeople and give them real leads instead of simply demanding more calls.
• Spend considerable time on production floors and job sites performing needed tasks and adding production value as well as developing employee relationships.
• Spend a lot of time with customers, learning what they really need, carefully considering how they or someone in their network can meet those needs.
• Be a committed brand manager, constantly nurturing the brand in the market by continually directing and helping to manage strong marketing campaigns.

If a bad recession in the overall economy does happen, your market share and brand awareness will determine how well you ride it out or even grow right through it.

Top-of-mind brand awareness is priceless. Those who have it usually earn it, and they remain in the market like flashing beacons as their competitors fade from the promotional stage.

I’m going to increase my marketing budget now and step on the gas even more during 2019. I also pledge to follow the sales, production and customer service advice listed above.

Are you with me?

The post Business Growth in 2019: Who’s with me? appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

The marketing cycle for most businesses is far more manageable than the overall economic conditions in the country but it is extremely hard to get a handle on, and this is because, well, we’re all human. We tend to concentrate our time and effort on either the most urgent situations or else what we feel like doing; what seems the easiest route to ‘get it done’ in the moment or for the day.

Unpacking the Marketing Cycle

The marketing cycle looks like this:

Business is great. New customers are responding to an effective and sustained marketing campaign. The sales team has been “crushing it” from several months of highly motivated prospecting and lead generation, meetings and closed deals. Business is so good in fact that it’s all hands on deck to service customers and snuff out the fires from so much growth and not quite enough hands to go around. Everyone is busy and cash is flowing.

At this point, management decides it’s better to back off on the marketing campaign a while to better manage growth. This is human nature and seems logical. It’s also the exact moment at which the inevitable ebb in sales that’s so predictable in the marketing cycle begins. But we always fail to grasp it at the time! I’m speaking from my own experience and I’ve witnessed it working in several companies over many years.

When business is great, you focus everything toward serving your current customers, even your marketing messages focus on current users, because it’s the natural thing to do. It’s as if we have “built-in forgetters” concerning new business development when customers and their cash are flowing in volume. And so, the wider market ceases to hear from you and your brand fades from awareness.

At first, you notice that business volume is steady rather than rising. Then you might lose a customer or two through attrition of some kind, maybe to a competitor, and you suddenly realize you and your team have more time on your hands and margins are thinner. Uh oh, Time to fire up the forgotten marketing and selling machines again, with increased urgency and limited funds. And so it goes…

End the Cycle of Sales Urgency (and Stress)!

A few things can be done to minimize the stresses caused by drops in sales that occur as a result of being a victim to the marketing cycle.

• First thing is your product and service quality. You must fulfill your promises or your brand will lose precious market trust. Referrals are precious and result from real quality.
• Second, you need to resist the temptation to focus on operations and production at the expense of keeping marketing campaigns funded and managed. You also need to direct your sales force to keep hunting when business is great, trusting customer service to others in the company.
• Third, if business is good, invest in a new employee or subcontract the support that can dedicate their efforts specifically to the growth side of your business, and don’t back off when business is booming, for a change! You will need all the brand awareness you can get next recession. If sales slow down and revenues decline, keep the marketing and sales effort at full pitch, for a change. Find less critical areas in the business to cut costs, for a change.

Implement these three strategies and see what happens to your revenue curve over the next 2 or 3 years.

Rather than rearranging the deck chairs every time you get really busy, try adding another chair to increase and sustain your crucial marketing activities, for a change!

Applying discipline to managing the marketing cycle in this manner will have the happy effect of keeping business and cash flow strong enough to avoid the anxieties of economic hardship during those inevitable slow periods. You’ll have the assurance that market share and top-of-mind awareness are always in your favor.

The post Stop Riding The Marketing Cycle! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Does your company sell mostly to individual consumers? If so, your customer targeting can get complicated and may require a high degree of personalization. Consumers’ tastes and preferences in features/benefits run in multitudinous different directions and with choices at their fingertips, you need to build customer personas and tailor multiple sets of messages to different groups or individuals today. That is if you want your brand to stand out and lead your consumer category.

Does your business sell mostly to other businesses? Then your target audience is easily defined! You sell to the CEO or the business owner, often the same person. Simple. And how nice that is for helping you determine your branding and positioning strategy!

This approach is fundamental to having an authentic and effective brand in the business products & services (B2B) world. But some salespeople and even some business owners argue that end users of equipment, software or services highly influence decisions and must be sold first. Engineers, specifiers and purchasing managers are the ones who do all the “shopping” and make the final recommendation and therefore, can seal the decision – or so you may think.

The target of ALL B2B marketing is the CEO.

CEOs and senior executives have a unique mindset and language. CEO’s don’t think like everyday consumers when making business buying decisions. They wear a very different hat for that. Business buying decisions are just as emotion-based if not more so, but for very different reasons.

Think of the business meetings you’ve had with CEOs present. They cut through the minutia and get to the key points fast (even when being patient with others out of courtesy). They are starved for new information that can guide their decisions.

Consider what a respected millennial digital marketer, Miranda Casey, has to say. “Working in the tech industry and targeting CEOs, I’ve come to understand the importance of getting to the point fast and ‘proving the why’ as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s not every day that a company decides to make a thousand or million dollar decision…”

Additionally, the CEO may have his or her own personal motives for choosing a supplier for their business, and nobody can know exactly who else the CEO knows or what else could motivate their decisions. Remember that “blood runs thicker than water” and relationships make a difference, sometimes all the difference — all things being equal, or even not so much. The lesson here is to take the time (and be patient) to build relationships with the CEOs in your target market.

Talking with End Users only FEELS like sales work.

Seasoned B2B salespeople know that top-down selling works much better than the bottom-up approach. Business owners and executive leaders are constantly on the lookout for the best suppliers and partners to help improve their companies and gain competitive advantages. Sure, they are loyal to proven providers but keep an eye on the consistency of quality and value received. If it’s clearly demonstrated to the CEO that replacing a supplier can solve real problems and increase profitability, the old one gets the boot and the new supplier celebrates a business win

Marketing:  Your Intangible B2B Sales Force 

The same principle applies in B2B marketing. Position your brand only for the CEOs in the industries you serve. Don’t try pushing your list of features. That’s a consumer-based commodity approach! Explain, rather, the actual and differentiated results your solutions provide clients, maybe even their competition.

As your messages get through to your CEO targets with the ringtone of relevance, your brand will begin to develop a subtle (even if at first subconscious) mental interest. Then a natural value-focused curiosity will make learning more about your product/service part of their to-do list.

With a continued consistency of strong messages, your pricing and business model will be investigated or directly inquired of – your opportunity to close new business.

Demonstrate category leadership to your target company CEOs and they will wonder if they should be doing business with you.

The post CEOs and Consumers Decide Differently appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.