Strategy

One of the most important tenets of marketing strategy is KNOW THY CUSTOMERS. (Second-most important would be YOU ARE NOT YOUR TARGET MARKET). This applies to all marketing, but today I’m going to point out how it applies in the world of online marketing, specifically if you expect to reach out to your target markets using socila media tools.

Forrester Research has published a rudimentary version of their Social Technographics tool online for you to play with:

http://www.forrester.com/empowered/tool_consumer.html

Take a peek. Then imagine you’re planning an online marketing campaign in which you hope your potential customers (let’s call them “users” to be polite) will become active participants in your online forum/community/tool/discussion/what-have-you. What you’re going to need to do is create a platform in which your desired customers can engage at a level that will help you meet your business objectives.

One of the things you need to bear in mind for creating your platform is how involved you want your users to be, and how involved they want to be in the online interaction. Are they participators? Passive viewers? We need to think about what level of engagement is required to make an “ideal” user for your online marketing activities, and what age/demographics we might expect that person to be. If the sort of person who’s going to play along with you online is NOT the sort of person who your product/service is aimed at, then you need to readjust or rethink your online marketing activities.

Define your ideal user profile. For an online community dedicated to the chess community, for example, it might be:

• People who are open to connecting with other people or organizers in an online community (therefore they have some level of trust for online interactions);
• People you expect are interested in chess;
• People who have at least a moderate amount of disposable income and spending ability (otherwise good luck selling your product to them, or getting advertisers to pay for space on your site: advertisers will not be interested in people who do not spend money).

This is going to start pointing us to certain categories of age, education, income level, gender, geography, etc. There will be an “ideal user” and then several categories of “semi-ideal users” that we want to plan around. Your decisions for site design, functions, activities etc. in your online marketing will need to be slanted towards those specific categories in order to get enough users to make it worthwhile.

Bringing us back to the Forrester Research Social Technographics profiles, we don’t get very much information to go by on the free version of this tool, and I’m opposed in principle (and pocket) to paying the outrageous prices these companies charge for their research reports. But it does give us some suggestions about the age and gender groups we can expect to demonstrate certain types of online activities.

Take a look… see what conclusions you start to draw from it.

I had a wonderful conversation this morning with Jayne Weatherbe, a family and couples therapist (okay! she’s a sex therapist! I said it!). Aside from showing up in the most fantabulous, colorful jacket I’ve seen in ages, Jayne got right to my heart by telling me about her love of dance. We also talked about what I do, and Jayne shared of some of where she is at with her business. That’s HER business and I’m not telling tales out of school here, but as a result of where our conversation went, I found myself reflecting on something that I felt was worthy of a blog post. Here it is.

In my workshops, I teach people about strategic planning so they can use those skills themselves and build a stronger business (or non-profit). But sometimes you get to a place in your business where you’re not sure if you are still totally in love with it (maybe the same as marriage?). I just feel it’s important to tell you this: strategic planning will not make you fall back in love with your business. Similarly, if you are not sure whether the life of entrepreneurship is right for you, no amount of business planning, strategic planning, marketing, social media, yadda yadda etc. etc. will make your decision to go into business for yourself any easier. You’ve got to feel a drive for it.

You MUST have passion for what you want to do as a business. Don’t just do it for the money – do it for love, and the money will follow (or not – let’s be realistic – but at least if you’re doing it for love you can still respect yourself in the morning).

So what happens when you’ve got a business that used to give you the “shock tingles” and now leaves you somewhat “meh?” There are a few ways that I know of to deal with this situation:

1) Find something new about your business that draws your heart into it again. I used professional development and some personal soul-searching activities (yes, involving visuals) to help me through the transition I needed to make when I moved from Vancouver to Victoria, after I became a mom. Allowing yourself to renew your skills may refresh your passion for work, or give you some new flavours to work with. Learning graphic facilitation did it for me in December 2008, and since then I’ve invested in continual professional development because it keeps me falling in love with my work over and over again. I’m lucky like that.

2) Make an exit plan. Identify the value of your business, and ask whether it could be operated by somebody else. If you’ve been in business for a while, your client lists and reputation may be worth something – but you can’t just dump them on some poor unsuspecting buyer and flee. That’s not doing your clients or your buyer any good. Instead, make a short-term plan (6-12 months) for how you will get your business ready to be operated by a new owner, and do what needs to be done. Finding a buyer is challenging; I will not fool with you on that one. Business brokerage is not my line of work, alas, but there are professionals out there to help you!

3) Take a break – without a firm return date – and see if you can rediscover your passion after you’ve been away from the day-to-day crush for a while. It could be that you’re just burned out and need a rest. Some time away will help you see your business more clearly, and you may realize you need to make some changes to continue being happy.

Options 1 and 3 can probably be combined quite happily!

The bottom line is that there’s no point in being in business BY yourself – be in business FOR yourself. If you’re not in love with what you’re doing, take action. Life’s too short to stay shackled to something that doesn’t make you feel happy.

Sometimes customers know what they want – they want a public relations expert, perhaps, or someone to give them HR advice. They know what that person should be able to do for them and what the results should be. No fuss, no muss. It’s simple. Then they start looking out there for a service provider and find… complexity. Lots of verbiage that says in 500 words what they’d really like to find in 50 words or less. Promises of engaging, visibility, transparency, accountability, reassurance (insert other words from Marketing Buzzwords 2010).

I recently discovered this when I went looking for a few good folks to help me out on a couple of management/marketing tasks for Directis. So it occurred to me to ask myself, does a visitor to my website know what services I provide, for whom, within 30 seconds of landing? I’ll be making some changes to the Directis front page over the next couple of weeks to try to answer that question.

It’s been a reminder that despite your desire to add all kinds of flowery language about value, benefits, etc., those messages should be secondary to the basic “For Who” and “Do What?” that is the core of your business. Answer the simple questions first!

Recent coverage of the Dervaes family’s attempts to trademark and protect the phrase “urban homesteading” reminds me of a question I used to hear when I was teaching at the Self-Employment Program at Douglas College, in Vancouver.

“How should I copyright or trademark my business idea?”

My answer was usually, “don’t bother.” If you’ve got a business idea, that’s fantastic. It’s not worth a DIME until you successfully roll it out to the market and begin racking up sales. If you can build a good reputation for your product or service, consistently manage to distribute and sell your offering, and experience positive returns on your investments of time and money, then you are very much ahead of the game.

“But what if somebody steals my idea?”

You should be so lucky. If somebody wants to rip off your concept and take it to market, it’s probably a good idea.

Is this the core of your business plan?

Now, don’t get me wrong. If you’ve invented something fantabulous, like a great new polymer that makes soft squishy shoes that can go in the dishwasher, float, and somehow be appealing to ages 13-93, then yes you probably need to speak to a patent lawyer. Real scientific advances should be registered with a patent so that the intellectual property is validated and registered, so that your brilliance is not lost to mankind if you are hit by a bus. Also, you need to get working on a business plan for marketing, sales, distribution, human resources, finance and IT to support your invention. Because it’s worthless otherwise.

But if all you’ve figured out is a better way to get people to part with their money, for something that is perhaps a little novel or particularly useful, it’s still not worth anything – and not worth protecting – until you have demonstrated its market viability. And once you have validated that viability, then you are probably sitting on a healthy business that can easily weather competition from others who wish to copy and compete.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. When you’re starting a business, don’t be worried if somebody wants to copy you. Be worried if NOBODY does.

That term “strategic” gets bandied about quite a lot. Seems like everything these days should be considered strategically. That word is getting a lot of airtime! Today I’d like to define what is strategic and what other kinds of planning are out there.

Strategic planning takes into consideration the whole context and environment in which you are operating. Before setting goals or developing to-do lists, you make a disciplined effort to understand what forces or influences are at work both inside your business or organization, and outside it. You acknowledge that you are not working in a “closed system” therefore your context will be shifting as you put your decisions into action, so you continue checking – internally and externally – that the information you have and the assumptions you’ve made about your context are continuing to be correct. Strategic planning also means that you look at your business/organization’s resources in an ‘overall’ perspective and make decisions about how to apply your strengths & resources while defending your weaknesses.

A marketing plan by itself is not strategic. Neither is social media. However, when you have assessed your own strengths/weaknesses, and gathered sufficient information about your potential customers, you are able to make decisions about what products to offer to the market and what marketing techniques to use: advertising, networking, public speaking, community sponsorship, social media, writing, etc. Those decisions are strategic. From there you move into the tactical/operational planning, in which you determine how to apply the chosen techniques.

Similarly, decisions about exactly which person to hire are not strategic on their own. Deciding that you will move from being a one-person company to employing others is a strategic decision, as is deciding you want to develop a reputation as an “employer of choice” for a certain type of employee. With those strategic decisions made, you move into operational planning: how will you make that change?

In each area of business (finance, operations, HR, marketing) there must be some strategic choices made, and then they are backed up by good operational planning and implementation.

A strategic plan is useless if there is no operational plan and the implementation is haphazard. But on the flip side, you can waste a lot of time and money by continually making operational changes and trying to implement new tools, programs or decisions without popping your head up into the “strat-osphere” to look around at the context and big-picture environment in which you’re operating.

A positioning statement explains how your brand offers a valuable, differentiable benefit to a specific segment of the market. The typical format for a positioning statement is:

For ___(target segment)____, ___(your brand)___ is the ___(concept)___ that ___(competitive advantage)____.

The target segment should be as specific as you can possibly define it (see my previous post about effective segmentation). Tourists to Victoria is not particularly narrow: what is the demographic? Where do they come from? What time of year are they visiting?.

Your brand is the name of what you offer to the market. It might be your company name or just one of several market offerings you have. The concept is what your brand actually is: a restaurant? a concierge service? a tour company? an attraction?

The competitive advantage is what you offer that target segment which nobody else in your field can match… in a way that is deemed valuable in the customer’s eyes. It’s nice to be the only restaurant providing gold-plated takeout containers but that’s not a competitive advantage; it’s probably a liability.

So, taking one of my favorite restaurants as an example:

For professionals working in downtown Victoria, Pig is the licensed restaurant that offers an authentic Southern BBQ menu with quick lunchtime service.

Can you do one for yourself now?

Ever get that feeling when you’re hearing or watching a commercial… the feeling that the message is totally unappealing to you, as is the way it’s being delivered? You know – you read the ad and ask yourself, “why on earth would anyone want this?” It’s probably because you’re not the target market.

Okay try this one. You’ve been going to networking events for months now and telling people what you do. Since you have a product that appeals to a wide audience, you try to include everyone in your “elevator pitch” and people smile their smiles and nod their heads. And you leave the event and never hear from anyone again. You keep “tweaking” your elevator pitch but it’s still not working. What’s wrong?

It’s your segment. Specifically, you have identified a segment by specific demographic and psychographic factors, because you know exactly who your ideal client is. It goes something like this: somebody of a particular age/life stage and somebody who is interested in X and needs Y but isn’t aware of that need yet. Good for you – you have really narrowed down that target market! BUT – is that segment actually useful?

In order to be effective for the purpose of building a marketing program, a segment needs to be:

• Measurable – can you count them? If you can’t then you have no idea how big this potential market is so you don’t know if this segment is…
• Substantial – there are enough potential customers in this segment to make it profitable for you to bring something to market to serve them specifically.
• Actionable – you’re actually able to give this segment what they want. You have the resources, products, skills, people, etc. to serve them in a way that delivers value.
• Differentiable – this segment responds differently to offers and communication than customers outside the segment, so you’re able to craft something that speaks directly to their needs and predict a positive response.
• Accessible – this group can be communicated with in a common way, because they are using the same media, attending the same events, located in the same neighborhood or some other common property which allows you to use the same communication tools to reach them. If they’re not accessible in the same ways, you have to treat them as separate segments.

Look at the target markets you’ve defined (perhaps through use of the DIY Marketing Plan Template) and ask yourself if each of those target segments fits the above five factors. If not, go back to the drawing board and think carefully about how you’re classifying your target market for the purposes of designing product/service offerings, positioning the offer and communicating it.

I’ll be exploring segmentation, targeting and positioning as part of the DIY Marketing Strategy workshop on November 17.

There’s nothing more irking than attending an amazing workshop, getting all fired up with ideas for your business, and then realizing a month later that you haven’t done anything useful with the ideas.

I don’t want that to happen to you when you attend my workshops, such as my upcoming [intlink id="729" type="page"]Strategic Planning for Leaders [/intlink]half-day event on October 24.

That’s why I’ve developed an alliance with Rosemary Smyth, a fellow member of the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce and a very talented business coach. After you attend the [intlink id="729" type="page"]Strategic Planning for Leaders Workshop[/intlink], you will receive a 1/2 hour complimentary coaching meeting with Rosemary to ensure you put your newfound knowledge into practice.

There are only 12 spaces in this workshop, so if you want to seriously level up your strategic planning, get in there quick and [intlink id="729" type="page"]register[/intlink]!

It’s Monday morning. The week’s challenges lie ahead of you. You arrive at the office, put on a pot of tea, and dive into your email and phone messages. By the time you next look at the clock, it’s 11am and you wonder where the time went. By the end of the day you’ve accomplished a lot, but it feels like there’s still more to do. There’s always more to do. Wasn’t working for yourself supposed to be about freedom? You love your business and you feel like you’re really getting somewhere… but where? And where’s the money? Feels like you’re working way harder for the same kind of money your friends are making in their jobs.

OR

It’s Monday morning. The week’s challenges lie ahead of you. You arrive at the office, put on a pot of tea, and while you’re waiting for it to brew, you glance at a piece of paper on the wall. It’s your strategic plan summary for the month. You notice the objectives you’ve set for yourself, think about what you’ve got planned for the day, and decide what takes a high priority based on how things fit into your objectives. Later this week you’ll pull up a report from your bookkeeping software to see how your company financials are doing compared to the goals you set two months ago. The tea’s ready now, so you pour yourself a mug and go back to your desk, where you dive into your emails and phone messages. By lunchtime you’ve already made good progress on one of your strategic objectives, and also had time to delight a customer or two. You’re working hard, but it feels good, because you’re in control.

Which scenario would you rather be living? As an entrepreneur, I know I’d pick the second one if I was given the choice, and I am. It just takes a little extra effort and commitment to set aside some time to prepare a strategic plan and connect my daily grind with some long-term progress. Strategic planning isn’t the same as business planning, that research-intensive exercise dreaded by anyone who needs to ask the bank for money. It’s not about proving the viability of your business to some outsider: that’s another ball of wax entirely.

Think about it: when you’re working, you’re “alive” in a way you seldom feel outside work – your passion for this business is all-consuming. It’s stressful, but it beats “working for the man.” You can harness that passion and let it feed the best possible future for yourself and your business, by collecting together all your intentions and plans for the business into a strategic plan. This’ll give you the peace of mind of knowing that your efforts are not simply just replacing a job but building something for your future.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go put on a pot of tea.