Vision Of Success

I sat down to read my Interactive Marketing Guide 2008 put out by B to B last night, and found some very interesting statistics that will impact the way I plan my business for the future.

How business owners view email

• * 64% view email on their BlackBerrys or other mobile devices.
• * 69% users at work view their email in preview panes.
• * 59% of online consumers block images in email.

How business owners view spam

• * 79% of email recipients said that if they don’t recognize a sender, they sometimes mark messages as spam.
• * 20% said they use a spam button as a way to unsubscribe from messages or newsletters they’ve signed up for in the past.

What this means to you and me is we really need to be careful about the amount of email we’re sending out to the people on our list.

Because your recipients are just as likely to hit the spam button as they are the delete button, you could soon be disallowed from sending to certain servers. Does email need more refinement as a marketing tool? Definitely. But for now, we have to work within the systems.

One way is to blog, and begin relying more heavily on RSS feeds. Your customers can sign up for your feed directly to their favorite reader, and read you as time permits. It does have positives and negatives, but it is a viable solution.

Or maybe combine the two - I work my blog and my newsletter together in every issue.

If you don’t have a blog, maybe its time to have one custom designed for you. I love blogging (I have several custom blogs that I maintain) and would highly recommend you find out more about blogs.

How many of you are fans of Seth Godin, raise your hand?

I’ve read a ton of his books, and love following his blog. I finally got a chance to read his newest book, Meatball Sundae.

If you haven’t heard of Godin, or his book, the name may throw you a bit. After all, what does a Meatball Sundae have to do with marketing?

First you have to think about what a meatball sundae actually is. It’s the result of combining two perfectly good items that don’t go together at all. You don’t end up with something new and fresh; you actually end up with a big, sloppy mess that has zero attraction to the general public.

In this case a meatball would be the basic staples - the things that traditional marketing could sell quite well. The topping would be the new marketing - MySpace, websites, blogs - all of the magic that makes the sundae irresistible.

Unfortunately, most businesses still live with the idea of producing the meatball. They produce a product and continue to market it in traditional ways, usually because they don’t understand New Marketing.

To succeed in today’s world, you have to break away from the traditional marketing, and learn to play in the brave, new marketplace.

Take for instance Godin’s Trend 14 - New Gatekeepers, No Gatekeepers. With old marketing, the only way to get “big” was to get in with the big guys. You did everything you could to be noticed by one of the biggest companies in the marketplace. Once you were found, your business was on easy street. Not so today. The big actually tend to struggle as they apply all of their big, corporate rules to the new marketplace.

Where else can a tiny company produce a short video with no ad budget, place it on YouTube, be found, and within  a few short months have the video viewed millions of times? Only in times of new marketing. Again, this is with zero ad budget - YouTube is free, and shooting an in-house video can cost next to nothing.

But with new marketing, you have to step outside of the traditional box, and be willing to try a few things. And if they don’t work, try a few more. Then keep what does work, and try some more.

New Marketing is changing all the time. The important thing is to learn what you can, give it a try, follow the advice of others, text, and start all over again.

If you’re looking for something to read on your next flight, or even to take to the beach (can you tell it’s almost spring break, and I’m ready for vacation?) give Meatball Sundae a try. It’s a quick read, and really can put some new ideas into place.

Sometimes a site will be so different, it just makes you laugh.

I love the motivational sites, and read a ton of books every year. I enjoyed The Secret, love reading Jack Canfield books, and am even teaching my daughter the power of self motivation.

But sometimes you have to turn it all around - and have a good laugh. Check out Despair. This is an amazing site that really makes you want to order something - because it’s all so much fun.

You can get great a great t-shirt (my favorite is “more people have read this shirt than your blog”) or you can even build your own calendar with unmotivating sayings.

Building a successful website isn’t always about conforming. Sometimes it’s about stretching the limits. This site makes it easy to buy - once you’ve spent time designing your own calendar, why wouldn’t you order it?

Just think differently.

Have you gone out for dinner lately? Prices are really on the rise here in the States.

As a business owner, not only do I meet a lot of people for lunch, but I’m also always on the run with my family. So we eat out quite a bit.

I used to love the Quick Casual places because the food is good, and you can get in and out in a hurry.

Tonight we stopped in at Macaroni Grill. Food was great - and the prices weren’t that much higher than the Quick Casual places. Wow. Do the Quick Casual place really have that much more expense level that they need to raise prices? With oil on the rise, I know their pricing will continue to rise.

Could the sit down places use this to their advantage? From a marketing perspective, keeping their prices as low as possible - and letting consumers know about it - may actually help them bring in more customers.

So what can they do?

1. Keep prices as low as possible. With oil on the rise, they will obviously have to raise prices. But keeping costs low will ultimately give people more of an option.

2. Tell people about your low prices. During hard times, its important to keep up your marketing. Companies die faster in hard times simply because they quit marketing.

3. Bring people in on special promotions. Trusting an old favorite is sometimes more important than trying something new. The last thing someone wants to do is waste their money.

So you write a blog entry into your blog. Where does it go from there? I can it help you in business and leads?

While surfing around I was led to a very fun and interactive description of a blog post: The Life Cycle of a Blog Post. You can view where your post goes from the time you write it, through the process of being input into the search engines, and ultimately being read by viewers.

I’m what you might call a heavy networker.

I find several local meetings to attend every week, and head out with my 30 second commercial in tow, ready to make connections.

After every meeting, I follow up with some amazing people. So in addition to each and every networking group, I also add several face to face meetings each week for more personal connections.

But lately I’ve been having so much fun connecting online as well. And it goes much faster online than you could ever do offline. It’s easy to find people with like interests not just in your local community, but anywhere in the world.

My latest group I’ve started on Facebook has added 98 members in 3 days.  Want to see how it works? Come on into Facebook, and look me up as a friend. 

Every morning we listen to a local radio station as we get ready. Andrew made a great observation this morning. Even though we listen to a local radio station, most of the commercials have national exposure. They all are for companies that can help anyone in the country (some even the world) and list websites and 800 numbers as action points.

Where did all the small businesses go?

Could it be that traditional marketing has finally priced themselves too high?

Could it be that small businesses are more savvy to getting marketing that works - not costs a lot of money?

What are you doing to promote your business?