Customer value = competitive advantage?

Customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, customer value, etc. This "marketing literature" has been forward that customer loyalty and customer value is a source of competitive advantage. 

Marketers have always been insisting and promoting the notion that in order to compete in this competitive market – one must provide superior customer value relative to competition. But really what is customer value?

I found this simple formulat on Google. What are your thoughts?

Customer Value = (Quality + Emotional appeal + meet expressed needs + a hosts of other benefits) / Price.

What would you do when something negative is said about your brand?

It takes years to build your brand to what it is today. A lot of hard work but really it only requires one minor incident to bring it down. Similar to the notion of "trust". Trust takes a lot of time to build but when the trust is lost, it drops by leaps and bounds.

My view is though one may completely take control of its brands in the online space, one can minimise these negative effects, for example you can control the negative spread of viral marketing. Here are some of my tips:

1) Draft an internal social media plan for everyone in the company - this would signal to your team that your actions offline and online concerning your brand name is made answerable - of course most companies does not have a plan like this in place. But since the social media is growing at an exceptional rate don't we all need a plan like this? Ideally you should be on the online space listening to what's going on in the market place.

2) IF it does happen, you have to make sure we quickly respond to the problems. In the online word, speed is the most important:

- If you know the originator of the spread for example a blogger, you can perhaps contact the blogger to have a link back to our official response. Most readers/customers appreciate the other side of the story.

- If you don't know the originator (in most cases), you can draft a response on our website and submit that page to SEO. This would ensure that viewers/customers would be able to see your response on the first page of Google. 

- By using Twitter as an advantage. 

That’s all I can think of for now. But I am really interested to hear of what you would do or have done to control the negative bad mouthing of your brand name.

Social Media...what are your thoughts?

What are your thoughts? How do we use the technologies within social media to further promote our business? Why do we even bother about social media when there are so many other technologies we marketers could use?
 
Two questions to ask ourselves:
1)    What are our business objective of using social media?
2)    How do we measure social media according to our business objectives?
 
But really, the main question for me is...Is social media suitable for all companies? Are companies just following the band wagon? 
 
I feel that it ultimately boils down to the company’s objective and its means of competition and how they view social media. If the culture of the organisation is pretty much conservative and bounded by heaps of regulatopms perhaps social marketing is not the right platform for them.

But this is just my opinion. Let me know what you think..

Online Marketing Decisions for 2010/2011

I am trying to develop some online marketing strategies for this new financial year. I have listed below here some online marketing decisions that we have to make for this year. They are as follows:

• The best way to engage our customers and to be more relevant to them.
• How to maximise "behavioral targerting" in direct marketing/email marketing, search and social networking efforts.
• What is the budget or ratio budget contribution for online media such as affliate marketing programs.
• The best way to leverage social media.
• What are some of the other emerging technologies to include in our online marketing plan.
• Best methods to measure sales and movements, proving it's ROI. 
• How much of the other offline marketing budget should be shifted/moved to online marketing plan.

So do share with us your thoughts. Which of these do you think is the most important and what other online marketing decisions do you feel that we need to consider for this financial year.

Tips To Strengthen Your Online Ad Campaigns

Here I have some tips to strengthen your online ad campaigns without streching too much of your budget. I am sure you have heard about some of the amazing ROI which can be made through PPC advertising on Google, Yahoo and even Bing! I have heard return of up to 300% or even higher with this form of advertising. But there are other ways we can use to trim the fat from our search advertising campaigns.

1. PPC is not for everybody

When PPC works, it really works. But you can lose your entire ad spend if you don't monitor your PPC campaigns properly. As with everything else in business it's always best to be realistic about your chances of success in all your marketing campaigns.

2. Use Web Analytics
It is very important to know how effective each of your keywords and advertisements are really driving traffic to your website. Non-performing keywords should be cut and removed, conversely pay more for your best placements.

3. Website Optimisation

If you do not have a tracking on your website and haven't been optimising your website's ability to convert visitors into buyers, your ads ranking will appear infrequent, buried within search result pages Most importantly you will only be capturing the actual buyers but missed all the potential buyers.

By understanding website optimisation and conversion optimisation, you can easily double the return of all your ad spend. You probably won't be able to compete for the best possible placement for your ads. As a result, your ads will appear infrequently, buried deep within the search results pages.

4. Don't Use Budget Caps

In one of my previous consultancy role, I was given a very strict budget on Google AdWords. I was given a $50 budget clicks per day. On the surface, it was an excellent way to ensure that we did not overspend on the campaign..but I learned to realise that it was a bad idea.

What I was doing was forcing Google AsWords to decide on my behalf about where my ads will appear. For some weird reason, they ended up "optimising" my campaigns so that all my ads appeared in places where it no one seemed to look. The result? I got to stay within my budget but my campaign performed poorly.

So my advice is not to use it. A much better practice is to set your bids conservatively and of course by monitoring your spend.

5. Let Your Competitor Take The Top Spot
Bigger companies and brands tend to be more aggressive about bidding for certain terms. As a result, they bid aggressiely to ensure their ads appear near the top of the search results. I have read somewhere that advertisers appearing at the top of the side search results pay an additional 50% per click, which results in far higher campaign spends for what amounts to a small amount of increamental traffic.

So my advice is to let your competitors to have their spot. By bidding a little lower and spending a lot lesser you will probably drive nearly the same amount of traffic.

That's the 5 tips I have learned and discovered and hope that you find them helpful. Do share with me what other tips you use to further strengthen your site's presence on the internet.

Websites And The Tools You Can Use

Creating a great website and promoting your business via search engine optimisation and social medias can be really interesting. Through my experience in managine websites online, I have realise that its a painstaking learning process to start and market and online business.

I love social media marketing. It's an extension of search engine optimisation and represents a powerful medium - us. I hope that by sharing my journey of discovering SEO and how it works you can shorten your own learning curve.

I am not a slick, savvy e-marketer, but I have learned by eavesdropping, experimenting, googgling, reading and mostly participating in blogs and forums. As I have struggled past the first few mile markers on this apparently endless path, I've frequented wished someone could have guided me. I was looking for a simple, step-by-step, everyday language guidance. So, I have decided to leave a few of those trail markers on my blog to help my readers.

First, a few quick definitions (according to Wikipedia):

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - is the practice of maximizing the volume or quality of traffic to a web site (such as a blog) from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing ("SEM") which may deal with paid inclusion. The theory is that the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence. As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
  
• Social Media Marketing (SMM) - is a recent component of organizations' integrated marketing communications plans. Integrated marketing communications is a principle organizations follow to connect with their targeted markets. Integrated marketing communications coordinates the elements of the promotional mix—advertising, personal selling, public relations, publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion—to produce a customer focused message.[1]  In the traditional marketing communications model, the content, frequency, timing, and medium of communications by the organization is in collaboration with an external agent, i.e. advertising agencies, marketing research firms, and public relations firms.[2]  However, the growth of social media has impacted the way organizations communicate with their customers. In the emergence of Web 2.0, the internet provides a set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects online.[3]

• Viral Marketing - The buzzwords  viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing  techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological  and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.[1]  Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites  by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of search engine optimization, paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.[1][2]. Usage of the term "search engine marketing" has been inconsistent. The trade association Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) includes search engine optimization (SEO), and SEO is also included in the industry definitions of SEM by Forrester Research, eMarketer, Search Engine Watch, and industry expert Danny Sullivan.[3]. However, the New York Times restricts the definition to 'the practice of buying paid search listings'.[4][5]

OK, I can already imagine the old-school, traditional marketers out there shaking their heads. Right, why should we care about social media like Facebook and Blogs? Because according to Social Media Statistics, more than 50 million visitors have logged into Facebook just end of last year. In early this year, more than 10 billion photos appeared on Facebook and photo traffic peaked at more than 300,000 images served per second. So you see now why a little SMM might be a very good idea?

I asked myself, "If I am a customer in search of my product/services, how would I find me?" I started searching Google and there I was. Seeing me on Google was a strange and wonderful experience. Unfortunately, I appeared nowhere near the top of the list and people rarely click beyond the second page of the Google listings. So how to work my way up to the top of the charts?

SEO my friends, SEO. Listening to conversations with my classmates (who mind you are all top of the notch marketers)..I hear "SEO, the strategies, tactics and techniques for driving our business to to tp of the search engines' list".

Honestly, SEO is so simple its almost frightening. Always use a keyword-rich domain where possible. Place your keywords in the top portion of you page and iclude them in th the title of the page. Then, use variations of the keyword phrase naturally through the copy.

Drive more traffic to your site. I installed site meter web analytics on my new website. Then, I set the site meter to e-mail me each week, sending me detailed reports about my visitors, their locations and what they'd viewed.

Blog about your passion, and do it consistently. I discovered Blogger.com, a site owned by Google. Setting up my blog there, I found how frighteningly easy it was to establish a second web presence--three clicks and I was there.  Following the advice of Problogger, I knew I needed to update frequently and stay consistent. I began updating the blog continuously and developed a great little network of loyal readers who became regular visitors. The counters on my site meter increased, and I saw more visitors per day and a longer stay for each visit.

Get connected through social media sites. Everyone in my family has a Facebook, MySpace or Twitter page. From what I've seen, I'd bet even dogs are setting up "walls" on Facebook and are using them to meet French Poodles. Heck when I was a dog owner, I set up a profile for Mikey in Dogbook, in fact I participated in several forums and blogs as Mikey. 

Facebook is more than a big wave; it's an internet tsunami--in a good way. Most important, Facebook gave me a tool for connecting to old friends, and friends of friends, and friends of their friends who used to be friends. You get the idea. A couple of my Facebook pals had downloaded its mobile application to their PDAs, and they got text messages each time I put up a post on my page. So, I added Facebook posts to my daily to-do list. Right after I blog, I post something on Twitter and Facebook. They both alert my multiple networks that there's something exciting happening in my world.

Stay in Touch. Be helpful, and give simple but useful answers. Twitter asks you simply, "What are you doing?"  I keep things fresh at the website and Twitter when I can. Twitter also helps me begin word-of-mouth promotions--the internet equivalent of whispering, "Hey, have you heard . . . ?"

Update or redesign your original website to include tantalizing new features. The word-of-mouth concept posed a tiny little conundrum: Whispering campaigns require salacious little secrets. If there's no sensational, useful content that's helpful or interesting, there's really no point in whispering. Nobody wants to know that you just had lunch. Therefore, I found myself scratching my head and wondering how to create something interesting and useful. For me, video was the answer, and a simple one, too. Try animoto.com, and you'll see what I mean about video creation being easy. You can upload it directly to YouTube, adding more content to your channel; JingProject.com and ScreenToaster.com are a little more work, but very powerful. They're tools to create new videos of your desktop tutorials, presentations and personal videos.

Obviously, the internet gives us a lot more tools for inviting and engaging traffic, but all our technological sophistication must not carry us too far away from the basics: People still want good products at fair prices, delivered by trustworthy and charming characters who know their stuff and how it works.

How to Rise Above Office Politics

Going to work in the morning can sometimes feel like walking on to the set of a soap opera aka the bold and the beautiful.... with intrigues, rivalries. Honestly it can be a nightmare to navigate through it all and actually get some work done! Throughout my career, I have never experience such an intense political environment to what I am experiencing now at my current work place. 

I have listed below some "tips" which might be able to smooth your path and make the office environment a much more pleasant place to be in.

1) Avoid office gossip

Gossip can also unfairly poison your opinions of your colleagues and influence your judgement if you have to take decisions which affect them. Participation in gossip is usually the fastest entry point into office politics – usually the person who is letting you in on the latest news is consciously or subconsciously trying to align you with their point of view, or negatively dispose you towards their ‘enemies’. Gossip is very often a two-edged sword: ‘whoever gossips to you will someday gossip about you’, so the Spanish proverb goes.

All of the above sounds like common sense; the chances are many of us realise the destructiveness of gossip and yet continue to indulge in it at the same time. Taking the decision to avoid gossip often requires overcoming your fear about standing out from the crowd. However, it might be possible to take that stand tactfully: one good trick is to deflect the conversation with a question about the gossiper’s own life – they will invariably relish the chance to talk about themselves!

2. Place long-term harmony above short-term gain
If you happen to disagree with a colleague over the best approach to an issue, try and take your own ego out of it and stand in their shoes for a moment. Office politics often tends to focus on the person rather than the idea, so try and detach one from the other in evaluating the competing approaches. In many cases, there may be little or no difference in the effectiveness of the two rival approaches, and it may be best to just go along with the other idea to keep harmony. A 90% perfect solution done in unison can often be better then the 100% perfect solution which was only achieved at the cost of civil war.

Whatever happens, don’t let a situation build up past the point of no return. It is very easy to hold a grudge against someone as a result of something that didn’t go your way; however these attitudes have a way of hardening into something permanent, to the stage where you feel totally unable to approach that person. Try to keep the lines of communication open to everyone, however slight.

3. Respect others’ territory
Often people regard their office competencies as their ‘territory’ and will jealously guard them against all-comers. They might feel they have absolute expertise in the area, and are seriously put out if people even question them about what they were doing. Often the best approach in this case is just to let them at it, and keep your own tendency to feel ‘you know how to do everyone’s job better than they do’ in check. But what if you genuinely do need to make a suggestion? One thing which has worked for me in the past is to draw the person concerned into a conversation on their area of expertise, and genuinely listen. Often this ‘territory’ attitude comes from a feeling of insecurity that no-one values their work, and listening in this way creates a space of trust where they feel you value their opinion, and helps to lower their barriers. It also helps if you aren’t defensive about your own territory, and judge any suggestion on its merits rather than by who said it.

4. Don’t get sucked into the promotion whirlpool
Of course, one of the main causes of office politics is because we are hoping to advance within the company, leading to the temptation to keep an eye on potential rivals for promotion. What we don’t realise is that all this worrying about others is essentially a lack of faith in ourselves, and that all the problems mentioned in the first three points – gossiping, territory etc. – are just ’shortcuts’ we take because we are afraid we won’t go places on our performance alone. But conversely, not indulging in these behaviours demonstrates strength, courage, tact and a feeling for managing people – qualities which many companies would kill for! You shouldn’t be afraid about standing out from the crowd for the right reasons – it could pay you back more handsomely than you think.

But now what happens if the gossip is about you? It happens that regardless of how well you have followed this advice (and I do as a rule in all aspects of my life) that one will become sucked into office politics as the object of said politics, i.e. people fight about you, because some dislike you and others don’t. That WILL happen, no matter how good you are at willingly avoiding getting into office politics, especially if you are put in a position of responsibility. Most people end up having some sort of responsability in an office at some point.

Well, it’s important to keep it all in mind. Let me know what your thoughts are in this?

Internet is no longer the "New Media".

I have noticed that many seem to ignore the fact that the digital space has been around for more than a decade. Really it is no longer the "New Media" as what traditional marketers, agencies or media owners are trying to "convince" in the corporate world. There is a new generation of digitally savvy users out there who are ready to take the digital world by a storm. All so ready to experiment, explore and be part of the global online citizen.

I remember having my first computer when I was between 6-9 years old. It was an old cluncky, brownish looking thing which I didn't think you can hook on to the internet with. But all the computer then did for me was..yes..GAMES! I enjoyed playing the "limited" games on the computer so much that one day the computer gave up on me. Oh well..

Then when I was bout 14 years old, my father brought home a beautiful laptop from the States and I was in love. I was in awe with the power of technology and yes was in love with the internet. I spent all my free time on the ever so famous IRC chatroom. I was hooked. There was no looking back after that.

Comparing the technology we had back then..gosh so much has changed. Who cares about IRC when we have MSN, Gtalk, Twitter and Facebook! 

The maturing digital community has created a critical mass that is so large, large enough for us marketing profesionals to market, measure and to understand the different behaviors aspects of the different segments within the market. 

This is the insight which is sadly not practiced (as much as we would like) in the marketing profession as measuring and analytics is not a discipline which most practicing industury marketer prefer to engage (sadly but true).

Is there a reason why?

Personally, I feel this lack of using the technologies we have available to our fullest will come back to haunt us as the digital space (moving forward) offers the best and most effective means to target our customers with the lowest possible cost, to measure and access our customers' preferences. I believe it is only through this insight that the marketing professional can make evolutionary changes to their products and services to match their customers’ changing needs.

Marketing leads

When planning your marketing efforts, should you cast a wide net to find lots of leads, or a narrow net to find highly qualified leads? Here's how to decide.

Should your time and money be spent in a concentrated fashion, courting a few potentially extremely valuable customers or should you cast a wider net, spreading your contact information as far as possible, in the hopes of catching a larger number of less individually valuable customers?

The answers depend on the type your business is in, the breadth and sophistication of your audience, your price-point, and the complexity of what you're selling. For example, consider the marketing of expensive, complex items such as passenger jets or nuclear power plant turbines. The volume of prospective customer contacts generated by your marketing is less important than reaching the correct high-quality contacts with a very deep and sophisticated marketing approach. For jets or turbines, relatively few people are critical to the purchasing decision. It's more important to reach them than thousands of people who don't matter.

Conversely, for inexpensive, simple items such as makeup items, volume of buyers is important. Marketing for maximum market share and end-consumer awareness creates success.

To understand the tradeoffs, consider:

• Quality (higher cost per lead)
• Quantity (lower cost per lead)
• Why the tradeoff exists and matters

Understand those three aspects, and you'll understand when each marketing approach should take precedence, and what "taking precedence" actually entails in tactical terms.

Quality (Higher Cost per Lead)
When product price is higher, complexity of product or installation is higher, or value per deal is concentrated in a few larger deals, the quality of leads has a direct correlation to sales efficiency and success. The valuable audience you need to market to will consist of only a few specific individuals. In this situation, accurate targeting of marketing efforts is of more importance than the volume of contacts created. Why? Cost. It's likely that the purchase process will be extensive and extended--that each prospective customer will require customized, in-depth education about your offering and its benefit to them.

So it's important to exapand marketing efforts on only the correct contacts. More research and planning time spent before programs launch, and investment in higher-value marketing programs focused on a select few individuals will result in more revenue.

Consider these examples of how such tightly targeted marketing programs might differ in implementation from more mass-market-oriented programs:

• E-mail: Instead of using mass-mail-merge and large purchased generic lists, send a personal e-mail to the target contact from an analyst related to the target company, with a "cc" to the marketing or salesperson from your company being introduced. .
• Seminars: Don't hold large, anonymous hotel or stadium-based events; rather, arrange in-person meetings or small executive-level forums or individual lunches. .
• Direct mail: Instead of generic postcards, send direct mail via FedEx, with a personal note from you, as your company's CEO, on wedding-invitation-quality cards. .
• Materials: Instead of generic case studies, use specific examples as applied to the target company's own systems, cost structure, and environment, showing detailed knowledge and understanding of the most important issues, and how your solution helps.

In sum, high-touch personal marketing will always improve the quality of your leads if initially directed at the appropriate market. But such marketing is expensive on a cost-per-lead basis. You won't be exposed to as many people, so success depends significantly on the ability to tightly define the target audience prior to spending on them.

Quantity (Lower Cost per Lead)
When the product price is relatively low, number of units sold is relatively high, and individual deal size is relatively small, large numbers of sales must be made for the business to show revenue growth. In these circumstances, your marketing goal should be a lower cost per lead, so that you maximize the number of people you reach on your fixed budget. Usually a quantity-driven product has a short purchase process, and one where decision authority is minimally permuted within an organization: only one person needs to be convinced of your product's value for you to make a sale.

Marketing efforts can thus be relatively straightforward and minimally customized, using larger volume and lower cost-per-target programs. Standard marketing programs might include:

• E-mail to lists purchased from magazines or trade shows.
• Webinars or open seminars by city.
• Direct-mail postcards.
• Mass-produced materials, with generic case studies by industry.

With the above caveat in mind, allowing your marketing message to depersonalize--to regress to the mean--can actually have a beneficial effect on lead flow, as your programs seek to attract as many as possible of the specified (large) segments. Put differently, a specific message applies perfectly to a narrow set of individuals; a general message applies less perfectly to everyone. So when choosing between quantity and quality, err on the side of quantity (within limits)--as by giving yourself more options when selecting prospective customers, you will likely increase your overall revenue.

Why It Matters
More is not always better. Lead generation costs money, and if you generate too many leads--in that your ability to follow-up on leads is overwhelmed--valuable leads are ignored and lost as opportunities.

Since the only thing worse than a prospective customer who hasn't heard about you is one who wanted to buy from you and was ignored (as far as they could tell, you couldn't be bothered to contact them and take their money), you need to balance the value of annoyed lost customers against nonacquired customers.

What do you think is the true meaning of creativity?

Do you get it? Well.. I am sure you did. The cartoon above tells us a lot about creativity, doesn't it? But what do you think is the true meaning of creativity? Is it just a catch/made up word for finding innovative solutions?

Creativity is a word that have been used over and over again especially in the advertising and marketing industry. 

Before I get into it, let me first bring out the academic side of me (:P), to what is the definition of creativity. 

From wikipedia:
Creativity is the ability to generate innovative ideas and manifest them from thought into reality. The process involves original thinking and then producing. The process of creation was historically reserved for deities creating "from nothing" in Creationism and other creation myths. Over time, the term creativity came to include human innovation, especially in art and science and led to the emergence of the creative class.

From Human Motivation, 3rd ed., by Robert E. Franken:

• Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others. (page 396)
• Three reasons why people are motivated to be creative: 
• need for novel, varied and complex stimulation
• need to communicate ideas and values
• need to solve problems

In order to be creative, you need to be able to view things in new ways or from a different perspective. Among other things, you need to be able to generate new possibilities or new alternatives. Tests of creativity measure not only the number of alternatives that people can generate but the uniqueness of those alternatives. the ability to generate alternatives or to see things uniquely does not occur by change; it is linked to other, more fundamental qualities of thinking, such as flexibility, tolerance of ambiguity or unpredictability, and the enjoyment of things heretofore unknown. (page 394)

Interesting perspectives of creativity from the above two sources and I do feel the same. However as a person who likes to confuse things even further, here’s my attempt. Creativity is just something that I either consciously or sub-consciously create a solution which departs from the norm that tackles (or solve) the heart of the problem.

What do you think?

All ad agencies will tell you they are creative, afterall they are in the creative industry, its in their blood. Perhaps just ask them, what does creativity mean to them? And how do they measure creativity? a link to sales figures? to bottom line? cause there is a belief out there that if you can’t measure it you can’t improve it? does it apply to creativity? I wonder…and waiting to be intrigued.

What is an RSS Aggregator or an RSS Reader?

I keep seeing and hearing about RSS, XMS and RSS feeds. My husband who is also our Lead Developer once explained to me what it is. But honestly, as a marketer in this digital arena I barely have a clue of what they are. So I decided to do some research on it.

Ain’t jargon fun? RSS really means Really Simple Syndication and it’s a simple data-only version of a web page or what they call a web log. Now, why is this interesting? Because apparently it’s then easy to write programs which we can track XML formatted data stream and let you know when there’s a new material added to the site.

The problem is, I don't want to check 100 RSS feeds any more than I want to visit 100 Web sites every day, and that's where aggregators come in. Whether they're standalone programs, plug-ins for your favourite Web browser or email program, or Web-based services, RSS aggregators remember your subscription list, check each site on a periodic basis, and alert you to any new articles that have been published.

If you’re not thinking, wow this is cool then you are spending too much time visiting web sites! To scan headlines of just a dozen sites on an hourly basis would probably be a full time job and if you need to need to keep abreast of your industry, as I do, then you wouldn’t have any time to actually do anything else.

There are a few programs you can download that are RSS aggregators (or RSS readers, basically synonymous) for Windows and MAC. A few of the most popular are FeedReader for Windows, NetNewWire for MACs.

Don't like having yet another application running? Always a short cut with technologies. Apparently you can graft RSS capabilities into your Web browser (or run Firefox or Safari / which have elegant built- in RSS capabilities) or your email program.
 
Finally, you can subscribe to an RSS aggregator Web service which gives you a custom Web page that includes the newest information from your hand-picked RSS feeds.

Promoting your business

Here we are again, the end of the financial year and yes its the time again to start banging on our CFO's door. PLEASE I NEED MORE MONEY FOR MY MARKETING DEPARTMENT! PLEASE!!

Developing a marketing plan and a marketing budget seems easy. But not always the case when our budget gets cut before we even begin doing anything.

I have here some quick tips to develop a simple straight forward marketing budget. 

Every business needs to promote itself to acquire new customers, but traditional advertising is expensive.

It's a good idea to set aside a small, annual budget for traditional advertising. Decide which advertising medium--radio, TV, billboard and so on--will best help you reach your target customers. Also think about how you might team up on promotions and sponsorships with another firm, institution or even a client that has some synergy with yours. You will be surprised what you can achieve.

Next, get web-savvy. I love the internet and everything that comes from it. Knutsson Consulting provides web development services and I am a strong believer that website sells! An easy-to-use website is one of your best promotional tools, as well as a low-cost opportunity to reach your target customers. Think about how you can incorporate certain online tools, such as an opt-in e-mail promotion program, blogging, webinars, etc. 

A few other tips for promoting your business on a budget:

• Describe your company and the services in 10 seconds or less.
• Provide discount to your customers when they purchase in bulk or if they refer you new customers.
• Generate press coverage by pitching yourself to journalists as an industry expert available for comment.
• Ask customers to provide testimonials for your product or service.
• Sponsor a local event.
• Send thank-you notes to customers, suppliers and other people you come in contact with.
• And most importantly and what Marketers do best -- Relax--building awareness of your brand takes time.

7 Ways to Engage Readers of a Business Blog

People are always busy and in order to gain and keep readership as a blogger, you need to provide your readers with information that makes their lives easier, better and less stressful. 

Business blogs are a unique case because the general subject matter tends to be a bit dry. It’s up to you as the blogger to overcome that obstacle and provide the business information you are offering in a quick and easily digestible way.

How do you do that? Here are seven ways you can engage readers of your business blog and keep them coming back.

 1. Offer Advice
You’re likely blogging about business because you have business experience. One way to gain loyal readers is by sharing your knowledge and giving them practical information they can use in their own businesses. You can give your readers an instant benefit by avoiding abstract ideas and providing specific tips, advice and tools they can use right away.

2. Talk to the Audience
You’re already ahead of the game with this one, because the readers of your blog have interests that are common to yours, otherwise they wouldn’t be reading your blog. Get to know them by keeping an eye on comments, watching for trackbacks and listening to feedback in other forums. All of this input can be material you can use to make your posts resonate with your individual readers.

3. Share a Personal Story
Business is business and personal is personal, right? Not anymore. Today there is an increasing amount of overlap between the two, and people want to know a little more about the person behind the blog, beyond that they are an expert in business. So give a little of yourself to create a stronger relationship with your readers. 

4. Go Off-Topic
Throw in an occasional post that’s not exactly business-related. If it bombs, it bombs and you know to go a different route next time. But if it is successful, you can insert some comic relief, mindless banter and maybe even a personal story as listed above to give your readers a brief change of pace.

5. Keep It Short and Sweet
You could probably write some very long posts when you’re discussing your latest business endeavor or what it took to have your website redesigned. If that much information is necessary, split it up into a multi-part series. Use lists, subheads and images to break up heavy content whenever possible. 

6. Give Up the Wheel
Ask specific questions at the end of your posts to encourage reader commentary. For every few posts where you provide advice, throw in a post that asks for the answer. Involving your readers will give them an opportunity to take an active role in your blog.

7. Give readers what they want
Carefully read the comments provided by your readers. They are invaluable because they allow you to tailor your posts to the information your readers are asking you to provide. Acknowledge the comments, answer the questions, and address the requests and you’re on your way to building great relationships with your readers.

Share with us what some other ways to engage readers when we are blogging about business subject matter.       

5 Free Productivity Tools that Can Help You Do Things Better and Faster

So much work to do, so little time.

I personally am having problem organising my time because there are so many things going on in my mind.

 
More often than not, I try to do multiple things at once. Although multitasking ability is generally good, but the downside is its ability to drain your energy just to catch things up.

 
5 free productivity tools I use
I try to organise conventionally – post-its, notes, etc. – But I ended up with a pile of papers that look like a scrapbooking in progress on my office desk.

 
This gotta stop!

 
Luckily, technology offers tons of possibilities to help you be efficient and effective. Although some of them are paid services, of course for an obvious reason – more functions, more perks, I use several tools that are free.

 
Without further adieu, these are 5 free productivity tools I often use to actually free some time to do other than work – family quality time, hobby and interest, and more:

 
1.    Brainstorming and Mind mapping
I use Bubbl.us for my brainstorming and mind mapping. It’s free, innovative, easy to use and you can save your mind maps into your account. One of the best mind mapping tools on the Net, well at least for me.

 
2.    To-do list
For a simple to do list on the go, I use our traditional Excel and very old fashioned also use a note pad– You can create to-do list, strike-through on completed ones, etc. I am also starting to use my blackberry as a little *tap on the shoulder* reminder. I guess for a more comprehensive planning tool, that includes to-do list, you can use Zoho Planner. A friend once recommended to me. Apparently you can create notes, reminder, to-do list – like many good organiser can do.

 
3.    Bookmark
I bookmark most of the sites I found interesting on my browser. Its great to go back and read those saved web pages.

 
4.    Stickies
One of the most interesting tool I found, MyStickies actually ’stick’ notes on the web page you saved, for free. It works like bookmarking sites, such as Del.icio.us, but for a more private use.

 
5.    Start page and dashboard
The start page of all start pages :) iGoogle is free and you can put almost everything inside – Calendar, weather, news updates, interesting quotes, etc.

 
There are way many more tools I use, but the 5 above are the ones I often use and recommend.

 
What tools do you use? Please share by commenting to this blog post :)
 

A One Page Marketing Plan Anyone Can Use

Planning sucks. None of us like to do it and if you’ve had any corporate experience in the process, it’s no wonder. But planning is an absolute necessity if you want to be successful.

So how do we reconcile our need to succeed with our propensity for procrastination?

Simple: Re-frame how you look at planning.
We hate planning because we remember the endless meetings, hours of research that doesn’t seem to get you closer to an answer and documents the size of War and Peace. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Developing a Marketing Plan is nothing more than setting goals and making a to-do list that will get you there. It’s really not much different than planning a party. You’re basically creating a plan for inviting more people you love to give you money and then tell other people why they should give you their money too. Sounds like a party to me.

I found a few really simple, one-page templates that can be used to develop marketing plans. I’d like to share two different ones with you. They’re designed to get you thinking and planning and making money, not writing lengthy documents.

(1) One-page marketing plan # 1 – The first marketing plan template is one that I’ve loosely adapted from learning’s from the original marketing guru, Philip Kotler. (Even he doesn’t believe in hundred-page plans). It’s a simple single sheet of paper that outlines the basic marketing components or categories like your Mission/Objectives, Target Market, Offering, Pricing, Distribution, and Communication— you know, those 4 Ps we love so much in marketing. But the good news is that that’s really all there is to it.

You can find something roughly along these lines in an old “Marketing Management” book that Kotler wrote over 20 years ago, but I think the principles are still valid.
You can use this format as a place to put your big thoughts so that you can focus on what the strategies are.

I am making the template available as a Word document — both a blank template and a mocked-up sample plan, which you can use as a guide for how to fill out the template.

Download blank template #1 (.doc format)

Download mocked-up sample plan #1 (.doc format)

(2) One-page marketing plan #2 — The second one-page plan format I use is a combination of the Kotler plan and the Guerrilla Marketing process as advocated by Michael McLaughlin. This one’s not much different from the Kotler plan, but it’s less academic and more focused on emotional triggers that will get your ideal customer to choose you.

I am also making this template available as Microsoft Word documents for you to download use to guide your marketing planning.

Download the blank template #2 (.doc format)

Download a mocked-up sample plan #2 (.doc format)

So, there you have the plans I’ve been using — and my hat tip goes to both of the masters for giving me a starting point to create these one-page marketing plan templates.

Now, I’d love to hear from you. What do you think of these one-page marketing plans? What do you use as a marketing plan, and why? In what ways would you change or improve the templates I’ve offered? Come on, share your ideas.

Is Email Marketing Dead?

Email marketing has been around since the early days of the Internet. Internet marketers use email marketing campaigns to promote their own and/or affiliated products to prospects.

Internet marketers build up mailing lists through various methods, including ‘borrowing’ mailing lists – either the spam-free opt-in lists or the spam-invested non-opt-in ones – from email marketing companies.

I have been told many times that the power of email marketing is in the size of the mailing lists. The more mailing lists members, generally means the more sales the Internet marketers make. 

Is this true?

 
Those that have been actually using email marketing responsibly (like I have been) have grown to understand that the size of the list has nothing to do with results. In fact, having a big list just to have a big list can hurt you more than help you because of the number of bounces, etc. Having a smaller, but high quality list can be cheaper to manage and can give you better results. By sending targeted messages and not “spraying and praying,” marketers do see repeat sales, because they are using email marketing to retain customers – not acquire them. It’s about knowing your audience – not volume. 

Responsible marketers are using advanced tools to segment their audience so that, ideally, the reader is only getting information relevant to their interests.

But then, with the larger number of email spams out there and the more wise and tech-savvy email users today, email marketing is heading into extinction. Or is it?

Email marketing campaign vs. email spams
People love to email spam for one obvious reason – hopefully, their spam emails are getting the attention of the email recipients, and get them converted into ‘buying’ what the spammers offer – most of the cases, ‘products’ that main purposes are for identity theft and digital robbery.
With the countless email spams out there, the legitimate and real emails from Internet marketers are often accidentally regarded as spams.

This in itself loses thousands, if not millions of dollars of the Internet marketers’ money.

Email marketing campaign vs. tech-savvy email users
Tech-savvy email users regard email marketing campaign as a mixed-blessing – in one hand, the products Internet marketers offer can be very useful for them, while in other hand, they simply just want to get the free offers that often offered by Internet marketers to build up the mailing lists.

Free offers?

Yes – it is common that Internet marketers offer something free to get prospects to sign up to claim the freebies. Free offers come in the form of free services, free products, or free reports.

What tech-savvy users do is this: they set up a free email account from Yahoo!, Gmail or others for the purpose of getting the free offers. This means, they won’t read any incoming emails from the Internet marketers, which also means zero conversion – very smart, eh? :)

Despite all that – is email marketing dead?
In my opinion, not quite.

Like I mentioned above, there are prospects who opt-in to receive offers through their email accounts.

The prospects can be product and/or service users, or Internet marketers themselves that hope to make money online through affiliation. They want to receive offer, thus increasing conversion.
One problem, though – opt-in email lists are hard to built, simply due to the nature of the lists – members are voluntarily choose to include themselves into the list.

One of the solution to overcome the problem is through partnering with an email marketing company that offer you opt-in mailing lists.

The problem with renting an email marketing list is that you’ll never know where your email blast will end up eventually. Some do register just for the sake of the ability to send their emails to the list – they register with free email address created especially for this purpose – so yes, they won’t read yours, in this case.

Remember, the keyword here is ‘opt-in’ – there are literally thousands email marketing companies that spam their mailing lists. You should stay away from them, as using their service will damage your products or services reputation.

EMail marketing works for me. For one thing the response rate is much better. If you get a 4% response rate in print it is considered a success. I notice between 25 and 30% open rate with html eMail.

As long as Internet marketers can offer quality products and/or services, the email marketing is pretty much far from being extinct.