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Why Is Simple So Hard

11 hours 23 min ago


Why Is Simple So Hard

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

The other I posed this somewhat trick laden question on Twitter – “Is making something easier to understand dumming it down or smartening it up?” The answers I got were mixed. Some obviously saw that I was suggesting it’s actually harder to make some easy to understand. Others clearly felt that it somewhat of a disservice to try to make things that were complicated seem simple.

That, in a nutshell, is why simple is so hard. As any regular Twitter user will tell you, you have to work sometimes to get your point across in 140 characters, but the real demon is that we feel the need to make things sound more important than they are or to demonstrate in verbose ways how much, in fact, we know about something that others don’t. I can’t tell you how many times the editor of my book suggested that I needed to utilize use simpler language.

The problem with simple is that it actually takes more work. I often quote Mark Twain here – “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter . . .”

The most successful companies I know have been able to boil down what they do, what they stand for, what they are trying to do, how they are unique, or the innovation that will rock your world into one succinct and memorable phrase, and that’s the magic. Earnest Hemingway is considered by many to be one of the greatest American writers of all time. It is widely known that one his most famous traits was the use of short sentences. I’ll defer to Copyblogger’s Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well to act as a resource for this idea.

When I was creating the Duct Tape Marketing system for my small business clients I started off with something that was far more dense than the 7 simple steps that exist today. The paring down was all done by my clients that wanted something simple and doable. That lesson is a central filter for everything I do, but it’s still a challenge.

Open your business up and ask yourself how you could land on one easy to understand and communicate thing that you stand for. One simple, single purpose for doing what you do. One audacious innovation that takes people’s breath away. Don’t complicate it, no matter how trivial it feels. Turn to a 6 year old and ask them what you do and pay close attention to the answer because it’s probably not draped in the mask of importance that we so seem to cling to. Simple has far more value than complex, try it on and see how it feels.

Image credit: redjar

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Think Like An Editor

July 27, 2010 - 3:53pm


Think Like An Editor

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

I’m writing a series of posts over at Colourlovers for HP and what follows below is an excerpt from today’s post. I’m also doing some fun video interviews with real small business called Local Color.

So often content producers have no real plan. If they write a blog they simply decide that day what they plan to write. First off, this makes the writing process more difficult and makes repurposing much harder.

Effective reuse comes from planned reuse. The best tip I can give you is to sit down once a month or so and create an editorial calendar. This allows you to create some goals, but it also allows you to think big picture about what needs to be written to create a body of work that will have multiple uses.

You can always slip hot topics into your calendar on the fly, but you’ll find that if you do keyword research for your industry and use that list for topic focus, you’ll get far more bang for what you write and you won’t feel nearly as much pressure always trying to come up with topics.

Read the rest here

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Inspiration Is the Root of Commitment

July 27, 2010 - 12:34pm


Inspiration Is the Root of Commitment

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

I’m going to continue another day or two on this idea of commitment. Forgive me if you find it tedious, but it’s a really big, really important topic and I think it will lead somewhere helpful – I started with the Evolution of Commitment and A Convenient Truth.

Getting people to commit to spending money with your firm, and perhaps equally as important commit to returning to spend money, commit to passing your message and telling your story, and commit to referring your products and services, has become more complex in this everything is free, information overload world we find ourselves in.

Today I want to explore another prime driver of commitment – Inspiration. While we will go out of our way for an experience that’s convenient, we will mortgage our assets for an experience that inspires. Inspiration is so thoroughly lacking in most of our daily lives that when we find it, be it in a person, innovation, or organization, we get committed to keeping it.

It would be very easy to cite a company like Apple as a great example of an organization that inspires loyalty and commitment, but that’s just too easy. I’d like to share a couple examples that to me feel more personal in nature.

Seth Godin in quite possibly the most popular marketing blogger and author of the day. His readers are committed to helping him succeed. When Seth mentioned my new book in a blog post about referrals, several hundred people ran out and bought the book. Mind you this was not a review, it was a one sentence mention. I read Seth’s books and I enjoy them. But, and I hope this doesn’t come off wrong, I don’t always implement new strategies and tactics I find in those books. What Seth’s books do, in fact what all of Seth’s 300 word or less blog posts do, is inspire me. I always come away feeling better for having taken the time to visit and that, I believe, is one of the secrets to the success of brand Seth.


Inside the Threadless Office – Image borrowed from Guy Kawasaki

Threadless makes t-shirts, but there’s nothing too inspiring about that. The thing is Threadless makes the coolest t-shirts in the coolest way. The designs, promotion and most likely a great deal of the marketing is done by the customers. The image above taken from inside their Chicago headquarters gives some feel for why the employees are inspired by working in a playground setting. Threadless inspires by taking advantage of the Internet’s two-way nature to involve customers in the process of creating their product. This innovation inspires profits, customers and competitors alike.

37Signals boasts over 5 million users to online services with a ton of competitors. The company’s customers are fanatical in their support because the software does just what it’s suppose to do and little more – that’s an inspiring idea. The company inspires through simple ideas and incredible design. People are drawn to the almost counter intuitive innovation that holds on dearly to simplicity. The organization lives these beliefs and has been profitable from day one.

  • Useful is forever. Bells and whistles wear off, but usefulness never does. We build useful software.
  • Our customers are our investors. They fund our daily operations by paying for our products. We answer to them, not outside investors or the stock market.
  • Clarity is king. Buzzwords, lingo, and sensationalized marketing-speak have no place at 37signals.

If you or organization does nothing that inspires, no simple concept, no incredible design, no earth shattering experience, no commitment to an idea, no story that attracts – how will people commit?

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A Convenient Truth

July 26, 2010 - 7:39am


A Convenient Truth

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Last week I wrote a post on a subject I’ve been fascinated with of late called the Evolution of Commitment. The general idea of the post was to suggest that with all of this free information and free versions of products available it’s become more challenging to get someone to commit to your offering. I asked readers to tell me what gets them to pull out their wallet and commit and several themes arose.

One word that came up time and time again was convenience. It does seem that people will spend their last dime to get something that makes life easier, more convenient, and that’s something marketers must factor into every aspect of their business. It’s not always the best product that wins. Often it’s a good product that is easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to acquire that wins.

We often get stuck running our business in a ways that are most convenient for us and not so much for the very people we need to attract – customers. Some of the greatest innovations available today reside in making something – a product, service or entire industry – more convenient.

Convenient business

Take a look at all of the ways a prospect could find you and contact you. Are your contact details on every page of your web site? Do you have outposts in places like Facebook? Are your local search engine profiles enhanced with useful information? Do you offer multiple forms of contact – email, web form, click to call, IM? Can prospects get additional information without having to pick up the phone?

Convenient products and services

Do you have versions of your products and services tailored to every size and budget? Do you have trial offerings? Do you offer automated training to help customers get the most from your offerings? Do you give access to your products and services in ways that prospects want them – smart phone, online, offline, iPad, iPod?

Convenient delivery

No matter what your product or service you can always find new ways to give customers the ability to acquire it on their own terms. This is an area where growing use of the mobile device is just begging for innovation. I’ve been offering my podcast free of charge for years. Recently, I created a iPhone app for the podcast that’s available for $2.99. While the same information is available for free, hundreds choose to download and pay for the app for the convenience of getting the content delivered the way they want it.

Convenient message

This is a tricky one. If it’s hard to understand what you do that’s unique, what you stand for, why I must have what you offer, there’s going to be convenience friction. One of the best innovations in this area lies in paring your message down to the simplest terms possible.

Consider this About Us message from software service provider 37 Signals as a fine example of a convenient message – “We believe most software is too complex. Too many features, too many promises. Instead, we build simpler web-based software with elegant interfaces and thoughtful features you’ll actually use.”

While I think most would consider this an obvious topic, it’s not always an easy one to put into practice. What a customer thinks is convenience may not be what we think it is. In fact, it’s often hard for customers to tell us what it is. You’ve got to experiment and constantly push everyone in your organization to consider innovation through convenience.

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Weekend Favs July Twenty Four

July 24, 2010 - 10:42am


Weekend Favs July Twenty Four

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr.


Image credit: tm-tm

Good stuff I found this week:
300+ Resources to Help You Become a WordPress Expert – Pretty much more than you need to put yourself into the WordPress business

Etacts – tool that plugs into your Gmail account and helps you keep track of who you contact the most and who you’re neglecting

Popscreen – Service that makes it very easy to discover videos that are trending before they become popular

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The Social Profile Interactive Tool

July 23, 2010 - 2:43pm


The Social Profile Interactive Tool

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Email service provider Exact Target has been doing some very valuable research of late called SUBSCRIBERS, FANS, & FOLLOWERS. More importantly, I guess, is that they have been sharing this research and I think you should go grab this fascinating read.

Below is a pretty cool interactive tool that introduces us to the 12 distinct consumer personas they turned up online. Studying this kind of behavior allows you to get to know your audience based on their personalities, not just their demographics.

Go play around with the tool above for a bit, go download The Social Profile report

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The Evolution of Commitment

July 23, 2010 - 8:21am


The Evolution of Commitment

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Most of us want to sell something – want to get people to commit to plopping down the hard won cash in an exchange of value. That’s certainly one of the reasons millions of business folks have jumped into online networks and social platforms – to gain access to the hundreds of millions that hang out there and prospect for customers.

But while social technology has made it much easier to gain access to people, I think in some ways it’s actually made it harder to get those same people to commit to buy (or at least it hasn’t really made it easier.) While selling in the old days (2 years ago) was still very much about getting someone’s attention and making them an offer, it has now become much more of an intentional act of gaining trust and helping prospects evolve towards a customer commitment.

The Evolution of Commitment looks a bit like this:

  • It’s pretty darn easy to get a fan or a follower, but what’s that really worth by itself?
  • Using social media platforms to drive fans and followers to read your educational content furthers their engagement
  • Encouraging that reader to subscribe to your email newsletter or how to series is the link to gaining permission to make offers
  • Creating opportunities for subscribers to participate by evaluating, sampling and trialing your products and services is the key to demonstrating value worth paying for.
  • And finally now you’ve got them hooked and it’s time to pay up – but wait, why would I pay for something I can get for free in so many other places?

The response in the last point above is the dilemma of the free online world that people have grown accustomed to. Scads of smart marketers have mastered the pre commitment dance of know, like and trust, only to fall flat when asking for the ultimate commitment – money.

So what does it take to get fans and followers to commit, take the act of paying for your offerings?

I asked some of my followers on Twitter that very question and receive responses like:
“there needs to have been serious “can’t live without” value on the free version that would make me test out the paid version.”

“the idea that what i’m paying for has real life value, isn’t free somewhere else, or won’t lose half it’s value in < 1yr."

"add'l features get me from free to paid, as does a great free experience."

"It has to inspire me, be enjoyable and/or fulfill a true need."

As I look around at some of the successful freemium models, Basecamp, Evernote, and those that have experience challenges going to a paid model, Ning, I’m struck with the impression that commitment comes from an experience that so exceeds expectation, so motivates people to talk, and is so valuable that people actually feel bad not paying for the experience or come to understand their life will be better by making the commitment.

That’s a pretty high standard, but the clear message is this – people will buy anything that’s free, even crap, but they won’t commit unless it’s remarkably free and freeing.

But think about that for a moment – isn’t there a similar bar for any commitment? What gets someone to say yes to a marriage proposal? What gets someone to commit to giving up smoking? What gets someone to go after a job at a company with no current opening?

Commitment, and it’s semi-evil twin non-commitment, is all around us every day. What can we learn from it to bring to our business, culture and marketing? I think there is much to explore on this topic.

So, what tips you to a commit to something?

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A Book You Can Do

July 21, 2010 - 7:54am


A Book You Can Do

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Thankfully my newest book, The Referral Engine, has met with enthusiastic support. The book offers a road map for how any size business today can go about building a marketing machine based on deserving and attracting referrals. As many reviewers have pointed out, it’s a pretty darn powerful and enjoyable way to build a business.

Unfortunately, many people read books and get lots of great ideas, but have trouble implementing the ideas. The book ends with a workshop chapter that outlines the action steps you can take to build your own referral engine, but I’ve also taken the additional step of building a course that guides you even further than the book and provides the forms, examples and resources you need to bring the book’s content to life in you business. Now, with the help of the Referral Engine Pro course this is a book you can do.

Referral Engine Pro is a four or five session program conducted exclusively by Duct Tape Marketing Coaches and includes in depth course materials including over 30 videos, audios, and posts from me and other experts in the field of marketing. You can read more about Referral Engine Pro here and find a Duct Tape Marketing Coach conducting a program either online or in your community here.

The video below is an archive of an online seminar conducted July 6th that covers many of the core ideas presented in both The Referral Engine book and Referral Engine Pro course.

Referral Engine Workshop<

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Hire a Journalist

July 19, 2010 - 7:20am


Hire a Journalist

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

I owe the idea in this post to a conversation I had with David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

Most every business these days is really a publishing business of some sort, whether they think that way or not. The need to produce lots and lots of educational content has become standard operating fare in today’s Internet search driven marketing world. But, publishing content in blog posts, ebooks and articles, while considered compulsory, is not the easiest thing to do for some.

A smart move that businesses should consider these days is to hire a journalist, rather than a marketing person, to act as their primary content producer. If you think of your business as a publishing business, the need for journalists becomes obvious.

  • An experienced journalist will usually look at content in the objective, source driven, and factual way they’ve been trained – precisely the way that marketing content must be viewed and communicated these days.
  • An experienced journalist knows how to start with the kernel of an idea and develop an entire story quickly – another key success factor in more is more publishing business.
  • An experienced journalist, particularly one that’s worked in your industry, may possess key contacts throughout your industry and with publications that cover your industry – making them much more than a content production machine.

The good news, for you at least, is that there is a growing pool of very experienced journalists finding themselves without a publication to write for as traditional publishing operations downsize and go out of business, so now is a great time to snap one up, even if just for a few hours of work a week.

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Weekend Favs July Seventeen

July 17, 2010 - 8:14am


Weekend Favs July Seventeen

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr.


Image credit: a4gpa

Good stuff I found this week:
Adict-o-matic – Instantly create a custom page with the latest buzz on any topic.

WePay – helps groups collect, spend, and manage money – great tool for small networks

Guide to WordPress – 101 Techniques for a Powerful CMS using WordPress – a great 3 part series of tips.

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The Abusive Math of Cold Calling

July 16, 2010 - 8:32am


The Abusive Math of Cold Calling

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

If you are emotionally attached to cold calling, you might want to stop reading this post now.

At a recent conference I heard Mahan Khalsa, co-author of Let’s Get Real of Let’s Not Play share the following statistics. (I don’t have the source of the data, but my experience tells me it’s pretty accurate.)

Cold calling results in about a 1-3% success rate for getting an initial appointment and it’s generally abusive to both parties. When that same call is made with a referral, the rate jumps up to 40% and even much higher when that referral comes from within the company.

The conclusion anyone should make from the gap in these two points is that you should never leave the office or get on the phone to call on a prospect without some form of a referral. In fact, if you’ve got a hot prospect, you should probably wait to find someone who can refer you or you might just waste any chance of getting in the door.

So, let’s do some simple math – if you have a list of 1000 names to cold call, you’re looking at getting 30 appointments as doing quite well (who knows if they are the right 30, but we can use this for conversation sake.) Now, let’s say you drill down and do enough research to find 250 prospects on that list that are very well suited to your business. Then you do further research using social media to locate information and contacts that would allow you to get referral introductions and recommendations to most on that pared down list. Experience tells me this approach is likely to turn up 75-100, well qualified prospects willing to discuss your ideas further.

Make fewer calls, get better results – that’s marketing math you can live with.

A referral into a prospect can come from one of three places, your current customers, your network, or a strategic partner. It’s important to mine all three of these groups as you build your prospect list.

A key aspect of this concept, of course, is that you are constantly developing a hot prospect list. In other words, a list of customers you would like to do business with. When you have this as your starting point you can target your referral sources for specific requests. When you go to a customer or strategic partner and ask if they know anyone on your list, it’s much easier for them to help.

Now, here’s where social technology can really be your friend. Once you have a prospect list, connect with them in social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. When you do this, not only will they tell you a lot about what’s important to them and what their challenges and opportunities are, they’ll probably show you who their peers, friends and network members are. They may actually identify for you the best way to get to referred into them.

Do this with your existing customers as well because it will make it easier to identify the ones that are influencers, who participates at a high level in social media, and who might be great candidate to refer you to your hot prospect list.

The last piece of this tactic is that you also have a plan to educate your referral sources. If you find that you are just one LinkedIn connection away from a hot prospect and you would like someone in your network to make an introduction, make sure that you take the time to teach them how and why to introduce you. This assures you don’t waste anyone’s time and your referral source including that of your referral source.

This approach obviously takes more time and planning. You must develop a prospect list, research using social media, and plan for referred introductions. The end result, however, is a success rate that any sales and marketing person would be envious of.

Image credit: stuartpilbrow

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Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead

July 16, 2010 - 7:56am


Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Brian Halligan, co-author of Inbound Marketing and David Meerman Scott, author of New Rules of Marketing and PR, have joined forces and blended their love of marketing and the Grateful Dead to extract lessons from the band’s thirty some year run to write – Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. You can order copies now from Amazon for early August shipping.

The book project itself is, like the Dead, a bit unorthodox in that the authors kept the entire writing process a secret and are just announcing the book to the public today although it ships in a couple weeks. The book was written and produced in a matter a months (a year is often considered a quick turnaround for a book.)

Brian and David did an online seminar on April Fool’s Day – you can see the slides from Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead here

I met up with David at a conference in Washington DC and captured the video announcement below.

David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan take us on a trip with the Grateful Dead to learn how the iconic band can teach us all how to market and have more fun.

FYI: The song playing in the background of this video is Sugar Magnolia. The song was first released on the 1970 album American Beauty, and made its live debut on June 7, 1970 at the Fillmore West in San Francisco

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Color As Branding Element

July 13, 2010 - 6:20am


Color As Branding Element

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Kate Smith (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes

Color has built in meaning and symbolism and can be a strong element of your brand when used strategically.

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast I visit with Kate Smith Color Expert, Career Color Trend Forecaster, and Editor of Sensational Color, a site featuring a wealth of information on the subject of color.

In this episode we talk about the various meanings of color such as red, green, and blue, and how the physiological impact and messages certain colors contain can play out in your business. Kate also reveals her 5 steps for using color in business.

Another great resource for all things related to color is ColourLovers.

In this podcast:
Why Color has Meaning
Common Color Associations
Five Steps for Color and Your Business
Companies that use Color Well
Color Combination and Your Message

Image credit: quinn.anya

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Weekend Favs July Ten

July 10, 2010 - 8:03am


Weekend Favs July Ten

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr.


Image credit: LoopZilla

Good stuff I found this week:
100 Websites You Should Know and Use – from the folks at TED, so you know it’s smart stuff.

Pagemodo – nice looking and free Facebook page designer

TwitExport – fill out a form and export a list of you Twitter followers. This is in beta so you can only do 100, but could be interesting marketing tool.

Sendlater for Microsoft Outlook – Add On that allows you to set a schedule and recurrence for automatic e-mail messaging with Microsoft Outlook

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How To Add Your Business To Twitter Places

July 9, 2010 - 3:00pm


How To Add Your Business To Twitter Places

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Twitter has been wrestling with the location game for some time with a couple fits and starts landing most recently on something they call Twitter Places. The ultimate goal, I suspect is to become a player in the Foursquare check in kind of way. I have my doubts as to whether they can claim this turf, but I think it’s worth paying a little attention to.

If you have a business where people check in, an office, retail store or restaurant or bar, you can and probably should add your place of business so that people can simply click on your place and add the address automatically.

It’s a pretty cool feature from a Twitter standpoint because you can tell people where to meet you or where a big event is happening then Twitter will add the location details, including a map, without cutting into your 140 characters.

The image above is what people see at Twitter.com when they click on the location part of your tweet. (Tweetdeck and Twitter for the smart phone all seem to handle it a bit differently, but if it catches on I imagine you’ll see this added to all 3rd party tools.)

There are a couple things that will likely hold large scale adoption back. First people with lots of random followers won’t always want to give their location away and you’ve got to turn location on in settings and manually choose it each time. However, I do think it will be used for events and can’t hurt to get your business listed.

Here’s how you get listed. (There is no formal process you just add your business as a user)
1) Log in to twitter.com and got to setting – make sure “Add a location to your tweets”
2) Go to your home page and write a tweet.
3) Click on the location at the bottom of the tweet (it will ask to choose your current location and try to find you)
4) Click on whatever location is there and scroll to bottom and select search places (unless you already see your location on the list)
5) Put in your City to search and then after it searches click Add This Place
6) Enter the name and address of your business and that’s it.
7) Now when you tweet from your business it will add your location and others can choose it too

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Your Market Is a Person

July 8, 2010 - 9:27am


Your Market Is a Person

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Target Market as defined by Wikipedia: A ‘target market or target Audience is the market segment which a particular product is marketed to.

The concept of defining a target market is a bedrock kind of tool for any business. My experience, however, is that the clinical approach often taught in marketing courses seems to negate the fact that markets, whether B2B or B2C, are people. This rather obvious fact becomes even more relevant as social technology helps put a face on even the most virtual of client relationships.

Understanding the persona of your ideal client is the first step to creating a marketing strategy that will allow you to effectively carve out a market to build the kind of marketing momentum that can only be described as attraction. When you view your market as a real live image of a personality you can begin to speak to that person in a language that builds trust on the most personal level. But first you must know their story!

Demographics are a start

Look at your current customers. What are the common demographic characteristics shared by your most profitable, referral generating customers. Why this select group? Because there’s probably something very right about how you attracted this group that leads them to the emotional connection required to make referrals. Understand and catalog what you can demographically as a starting point for getting a clearer picture.

Narrowing your sights

Once you start to get a better view of your profitable customers, it’s time to take a good, hard look at the other 70%. You know, the ones you took on because you couldn’t say no or because it had been a slow month or that you’ve done some business with for years, but you don’t really do that kind of work any more. Every organization has those and I’m suggesting you purge them, (well, maybe some) but I do know that in order for your ideal customer approach to become a strategy, you need a very clear picture of the clients you don’t want and you need to start saying no.

Social media adds focus

Getting psychographic and behavioral data on a market is a common practice for marketers as it adds much richer information than statistical data can. Collecting this kind of information used to be expensive and more aggregate than personal. Social media adoption has altered this piece of the puzzle in interesting ways. People joke about people talking about what they had for dinner on Twitter, but that kind of information, while seemingly inane, is marketing gold. Append your entire customer list with everything you can know through social media and you will discover more about what motivates and drives your customers than years of research could ever tell – including which ones wield influence and love to connect and refer.

Visualize real people

Once you’ve done the research above on your ideal client it’s time to start getting visual. Write out a description of a real ideal client that you would love ten more of. Write everything you can think of – What they look like, what they think, what they want, what they fear, what they think fun, risk, and passion look like. Use photos of real people to help you create this total persona and then hang it on the wall for all to absorb. Maybe you need to do this a couple times and develop several distinct ideal client personality types, but imagine if you put this these images and descriptions on the wall and referred to them as you made sales calls, wrote web copy or brainstormed about a product innovation. It’s like having them in the meeting with you. In fact, go a bit over the top and create life size ideal client cut outs and invite Bill and Mary and Tom into your meetings. At least, it will add some fun to the meeting.

A database for your customer

Once you start to get a feel for accessing this level of personal understanding you can begin to change your concept of the client database. Instead of looking at it as a tool for you, flip it and make it a tool for them. In other words, start building a database that contains everything you can know about your customers and use it to make them feel special. Use it to note when significant things have happened, listen to what they are saying in social media and engage on a personal level, send them a birthday gift, or remind them that it’s their anniversary. Every once in a while, sit down with them and ask them to share. It might start with them sharing something about your products and services but, ultimately, if you take this practice to heart, it will turn to them sharing how you can help them achieve their goals.

I don’t know, it just seems like it’s way more fun to work with people who know you’re a person too.

Image credit: /cesco

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Mobile Payments As Marketing Strategy

July 7, 2010 - 9:27am


Mobile Payments As Marketing Strategy

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

The mobile device continues to evolve and one trend that’s finally picking up steam in the US is the act of making and accepting payments via mobile payment systems. Mobile payments are already very common in other parts of the world where less infrastructure friction (read: entrenched industries that don’t want to change the game) allowed for faster adoption.

The question marketers of all kinds need to start asking is if their customers are mobile, how mobile does the business need to be? I get push back every time I mention text messaging and SMS, but like it or not you can’t sit this out, you’ve got to start getting serious about every aspect of mobile marketing, including this one.

While mobile payments may seem like just another way to accept money, much like checks and credit cards, I think you’ll start to see integration that other forms of payment don’t offer. It’s tough to integrate with someone’s checking account, but on a mobile device loaded with a database, GPS and compass, well, you’ve got the makings of a location aware loyalty program with the ability to offer loyalty specials and club and membership perks through an electronic wallet kind of approach.

The first adoption will come with more convenience. Recently, I was selling books at an event attended by eBay sellers and was able to offer “bump” payment with the PayPal iPhone app to those that wished to pay that way. No credit card reader, no paper slips, instant transfer, and more secure than written forms. Of course the person sending the money must have the same technology in order to play.

I’ve signed up for and ordered my Square account and reader – a tool that plugs into the iPhone, iPad or Android headphone port that reads credits cards and allows merchants to accept mobile payments without the need for a credit card terminal or technology from the sending party.

Companies like Colorado based Mocapay have begun to offer creative approaches to mobile payments as a part of the overall marketing puzzle. Using the tool you can push out text messages to encourage purchase, personalize follow-up messages and track and reward frequent purchases with rewards programs.

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Social Media Makes Email Even Stronger

July 6, 2010 - 7:42am


Social Media Makes Email Even Stronger

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Gail Goodman (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes

This week’s guest on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is Gail Goodman, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer of leading email marketing service provider Constant Contact.

Over the last year or two email marketing has taken a back seat to social media in terms of buzz. However, during the recession, firms that had a solid relationship with an audience via email held a much stronger position. Email marketing still produces the highest ROI of any online marketing tactic.

Commercial e-mail returned a whopping $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009, according to the DMA’s just-released Power of Direct economic-impact study—an effort the trade organization publishes every year at its annual fall conference.

A funny thing happened on the way to increased social media usage too. Instead of spelling the end to email, it actually caused an increase in the inbox. A great deal of social media activity still revolves around the email inbox.

I frequently field questions from audiences about whether social media has replaced email and I think the answer is that social media and email play very well together and, in fact, email has only become more important. Social media makes email even stronger and, when used correctly, email can make your social media efforts even stronger.

To that end, email service providers are looking for ways to help customers more fully integrate their social media usage with email marketing. Constant contact has added event marketing with plenty of social features and recently purchased Nutshell Mail a tool that brings a summary of your social network updates to your inbox in a single email on your schedule.

I spent some time recently with ExactTarget, an enterprise email service provider. ExactTarget’s purchase of CoTweet, a social media monitoring and management tool is further sign of the growing integration of email and social.

This trend will continue so while I’m a big fan of growing your friends and followers, get that email subscriber list built for the long term.

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The Future of Social Networks Is Vertical

July 5, 2010 - 8:02am


The Future of Social Networks Is Vertical

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Even as social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook grow, in order to remain relevant they will need to evolve. In my opinion that evolution will contain the formation of vertical marketplaces. Social networks for artists, attorneys and consultants already exist, but none of them have attracted the kind of adoption that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter enjoy.

Think about it, how many real estate agents, designers and accountants are on Facebook already? The tough thing about building a social network is to get the kind of adoption and participation you need to make the network a viable place to hang out. The major networks already have that and can tap it by creating networks within the network. The time might be right for outside players to insert vertical pushes if the networks don’t partner with associations and other data providers poised to offer an impact in a vertical market. (Seems to me that most industry associations and interest groups should be considering this kind of approach.)

Next week LinkedIn is announcing a partnership with a real estate industry player that will push to create a real estate portal on LinkedIn that can provide agents and consumers with commercial and residential listings within LinkedIn. A healthy recruiter community already exists on LinkedIn so a jobs database would be pretty easy to create. This approach would reach beyond the typical “groups” implementation to something much richer in terms of content and specific opportunities for engagement. Twitter lists combined with a Google search for job title or industry in a bio is one way to craft a list of any profession on Twitter. That process alone might be a good place to start. Look for more on this from the networks as they continue to evolve for business use.

Image credit: quinn.anya

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Weekend Favs July Three

July 3, 2010 - 9:20am


Weekend Favs July Three

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr.


Image credit: kosabe

Good stuff I found this week:

Launchlist - handy little checklist of items to review before you launch your website.

Ninite – Batch install common software on your PC all at one time. Click titles like Chrome, Reader or Skype and this tool installs them all at once without any attending on your part

CSS Inliner Tool - If you send HTML email that you create on your own you may find that styling that’s not inline gets stripped out, leaving some funky looking email. Use this tool from MailChimp to get your style converted to inline code and your email will render much better in GMail and other clients.

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