Is Emailing Newsletters Still Relevant Today?

Tweet

 

For the past several years newsletters have been an important way to deliver content for our clients but we may be past the tipping point of their efficacy. This is because we receive too many of them to read them all. And in our emerging “stream economy” this tactic may be unaligned with the way people today are absorbing content.

A Little History Lesson

When email marketing was still evolving and on the ascend we encouraged clients to engage their target audience with newsletters. It was a great way to build relationships because you could demonstrate new products or services, share what your company or your people were doing in the community, and provide events listings. The addition of really nice photography made it visually appealing, too.

We could put so much information in a newsletter: articles, editorial, images, video, surveys, polls, events. Newsletters seemed to be the ideal way to foster interest. We could even promote new subscribers through automated sharing! And all those links in and out really impacted search engine optimization at that time.

A well designed newsletter looked professional and provided enhanced credibility for many businesses.

All good things must come to an end

Gary Vaynerchuk recently spoke at Inbound 2012, the preeminent conference on inbound marketing held in Boston. Gary made many interesting points but his comments about marketers ruining every good idea really struck a chord. Marketers take every great new concept and suck the life out of them through overuse or in some cases misuse. This may very well be the case with newsletters.

Watch Gary’s talk about his concept of the stream economy and how he believes, as a culture, people absorb content today. Our team members at Zen Marketing are finding every day that Gary’s points about "micro content going to rule the day" is spot-on, and marketing tactics going forward need to realize this and take advantage of it.

A Shift in Delivering Content

Our clients are seeing a great response to taking the very same content they previously used in their newsletters and positioning it into blog posts as separate articles on their website.

Blogging is a great way to communicate with an audience. The reader can choose what he/she wishes to read and not waste time wading through the unrelated or unappreciated material. Best of all to the publishing business, when content is written and structured properly people searching for information on the web can find your articles through organic search, thus expanding your marketing reach.

The blog articles may not always be keyword driven enough to satisfy the savvy filters on modern inbound marketing platforms (we recommend the Hubspot® platform, use it ourselves, and are a Hubspot® certified partner) but the key here is to make it relevant to the intended audience.

If you are new to blogging, you might enjoy reading our article on blogging and why this important marketing/SEO process must be respected in today’s internet-driven environment.

Email still plays an important role on the outbound marketing side, side by side with social media. These provide measurable distribution processes and are used to announce the new content, which brings interested readers to your website. Your reader gets some (hopefully) compelling information, your site traffic gets a boost, and your overall message is enhanced. Plus use of this approach allows your top of mind awareness to be further enhanced and developed.

Zen Marketing is a Constant Contact® partner and we use this powerful platform for our clients every day. We have just refocused our use of this important delivery system to better align with the behavior of our client's target audience.

Even print can play a role- mailing a relevant article is a great way to follow up a face-to-face meeting with a prospect or client.

Shifting your investment of time and talent from newsletter creation into blogging will provide a better reading experience, fits well into the emerging stream economy, and requires much less work than pumping out entire newsletters.

The right marketing partner can show you how to further leverage your blog content and expand your marketing reach. You’ll get better engagement with your known audience plus create opportunities to become known with people seeking information, products, or services.

The Evolution of Referral Marketing for NJ Attorneys and Architects

Tweet

 

Remember when commercials were only about products for sale on television? There were “new and improved” this and that, “try this new” whatever. That sort of thing constituted the bulk of television advertising.  Websites, content marketing, social media and blogging didn’t exist.  Marketing hadn’t changed in decades; Madison Avenue made certain of that.

There were ads for cars, trucks, cigarettes and booze, but never would one see a lawyer offering money for injuries, or for the hospitals that sent the ambulances for their potential clientele. 

Remember when television ads for medical centers, prescription medicines, personal hygiene and contraceptive products, bankruptcy filing, and personal injury lawyers hawking their services simply did not exist?  While we still see beer commercials, most alcohol and cigarette ads have disappeared from the television ad scene. The remainder has taken over mainstream television advertising, and portions of the late night commercial breaks.

Television Was Looked Down Upon in Professional Services

Television advertising was so crass and of low esteem. Community hospitals would never stoop to such a level, as doing so may damage their reputations. The American Bar Association forbid advertising of any kind but was especially fearful of television. Besides, most lawyers and other professionals seldom, if ever, considered themselves as marketers; they relied on reputation and referral.  Only in the 1990’s when the Bar Association relaxed the rules did the “bottom-feeders and ambulance chasers” begin to the small screen.

Back in those days, it was considered a prudent and proud business that relied on the most traditional business model; word-of-mouth and referral was how business was done. Homogenous industries such as lawyers and accountants, architectural firms, banking, doctors and hospital executives networked in their local associations and the annual or semi-annual industry conferences.  They relied heavily on their retainer clients to refer others.  If one professional did not handle the client’s needs, they were referred to a specialist with whom they had a working relationship.  A referral fee, however frowned upon, was and is the rule of the day even now in many industries.  Referral networks and the reliance of referrals made sense, because it was the accepted marketing formula.

Today it is quite a different story.  Professionals must consider themselves a business, not an island unto themselves.  All manner of professional firms utilize mass media as a means of getting the word out, but costs continue to rise.  With all the clutter of television ads, and consumers tuning them out (TiVo, the DVR,), the conversion rate is nearly impossible to accurately measure and overall effectiveness is often questioned.

Where Are Professional Services Going With Their Marketing Dollars?

Like newspaper advertising, television is a valid form of push marketing. It serves a purpose but today companies are seeing far better results increasing word-of-mouth via the many social media platforms that have become dominant.  The digital world provides solutions to expanding the overall marketing reach of professional services, and a great solution may be closer than you think.

At Zen Marketing, we provide workshops for companies that wish to enter the networking and word-of-mouth arena. These offer an affordable opportunity to apply social media strategies and tactics into a marketing formula and can involve many individuals within an organization. Social media is also a great entry into the use of inbound marketing, the most effective method of this digital age.

A study performed by Marketing Sherpa reflects a drastic shift in expenditures for all business (see Figure 1.)  Please note the “traditional marketing” strategies are at the bottom of the budget expenditure graph.

A good way to get one’s feet wet in the inbound marketing pool is to develop a social media strategy.  By scheduling one of our networking and social media workshops, you can begin to understand the value proposition it presents.

Contact us and begin to grow your business digitally.  Who knows, you might be able to save money and grow your business concurrently.

Sales Team Motivation and Inbound Marketing

Tweet

 

We are approached by many companies who are looking to grow their revenue line, and in the process of understanding their approach to business development one question is universally asked - “How Do We Motivate Our Sales Team?”

First off- you cannot really motivate anyone. Motivation comes from within an individual. A person’s preference of behavior, both adapted and natural, really determines this. Having said that, we have enjoyed working with many good leaders, who have inspired a team of people to accomplish great things.

Second- a sales team is a group of individuals is not a collective or group mind set. Our workflow always involves the application of scientific online assessments to understand each sales person’s unique behavior and their motivators. When we understand a person’s preferences we can build a plan that aligns with that and truly engage their future drive to succeed… and drive greater results.

What drives motivation?

For some people it is purely money (and we screen for this especially where we are seeking people to fill commission based sales positions for a client).  There are several other motivators that can be measured using our assessment process. EG: You seldom see altruism as a motivator in business development profiles. So an understanding of a person’s unique behavioral and motivational preference can be a powerful dataset.

We also have an effective sales evaluation assessment, which measures a person’s understanding of the entire sales process. This valuable dataset lets us identify where a salesperson’s strengths lay, as well as where they might need additional coaching. It can be applied to an existing team or a potential new hire.

In other words, a plan that is broadly based is always going to be less effective than one that is built from the individual team member’s motivational perspective.

Give Them the Best Support to Really Drive Results

We then take this process one step further, by helping make the overall sales effort more efficient through the deployment of an inbound marketing process. If you want to see the batting averages of a sales organization skyrocket change the paradigm of cold calling into one where they are speaking to highly interested opportunities that, people that have the BANT necessary to insure success.

We use the term BANT a lot. This is an acronym for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline and all four of these conditions must exist for any salesperson to close a sale. Inexperienced sales people invest a lot of time in the sales process to learn one (or more) of these factors isn’t present and results in an investment of time and talent but no desired result. Experienced sales people know ways to navigate (or argue) their way around these factors but it can be very time consuming and not always fruitful.

Motivationally speaking, when a sales force knows the odds for success are higher with every phone call or email inquiry (because the inquiry has a high BANT probability) they approach the sales call more confidently. It is a lot of like athletics- players get into a cycle of success and that feeds more confidence and that usually leads to more success. Sales people also go through periods of ups and downs based on their close rates or the quality of the orders they are generating. A well orchestrated inbound marketing process can create this environment, one that drives better inquiries, improved lead conversion, and generates more success for the sales team... and the company.

Perhaps You Should Change Your Approach to Marketing?

With the proper application of a well defined plan along with a robust inbound marketing platform (we recommend Hubspot® and use it ourselves) you can consolidate almost all of your marketing endeavors into a single software-driven process. The advantages to this approach are:

• You will extend the reach of your company’s value proposition
• Your target audience will understand your company culture
• The value your company brings to your clients will be broadly and repetitively understood
• You will be able to quantify which tactics are most successful and where to shift your investment of time and talent

Perhaps best of all you will share that across a blog and different social media applications automatically and seamlessly. You will now have the ability to:

• Create and/or enhance the awareness in your brand that rivals the best public relations tactics
• Repetitively establish your credibility
• Provide opportunities for interested parties to become qualified prospects
• Maintain a high level of engagement over time
• Understand where in the sales process your investment in training and continuing education needs to be applied

Get the Facts

We have a comprehensive e-book that illustrates the inbound marketing process in great detail, and would love to share it with you. To obtain your copy, with no strings attached and no sales person phone calls, just complete the short form, above, right.

And if you would like to schedule an initial assessment of your current website and see an inbound marketing quotient just drop us an email and request a complimentary consultation.

How Architects Can Create Sustainability in Business Development

Tweet

 

Your business development or sales organization has been very busy. Think about all that time spent drafting emails, responding to voice mails, writing proposals with little or no real relevance, pitching to non-decision makers and not holding prospects accountable to commitments… in actuality that is a lot of time NOT spent selling, it is time spent chasing!

What percentage of the overall time of your sales efforts are actually spent actually selling with new prospects? And how does your brand and/or credibility suffer from these typical but common sales activities?

Time is Your Most Valuable Asset

Consider the impact on your top line revenue if you were able to reduce the time either you or your sales people spend chasing procrastinators.

Consider the impact on your growth if you were able to double your actual time spent selling (most sales people are only in front of new prospects (outside the scope of your existing core client base).

Here is a hint: an improvement of 5%-20% of the time equates to 2-8 appointments/hours per week.

What would this translate into with regards to gross sales?

There is a marketing process that can shorten the sales cycle and dramatically improve conversion and close rates. When properly deployed it can eradicate all those annoying time wasters many sales people get stuck with while providing your brand or product with a significant boost in credibility. The common term is content marketing or inbound marketing. More about that in a minute…

How Is Time Utilized in the Sales Process?

Just think about the amount of time that gets invested into:

• prospecting and networking
• engaging
• presenting
• writing proposals

This is usually followed by the big chase with the “prospect”… and then you come to discover that your sales people were on a big fishing expedition!

Sooner or later every business owner will realize the importance of addressing this situation.

Quite often traditional sales people sit back after all of the hours of prospecting, pitching, presenting, proposal writing and chasing and go over in their own minds why the prospect, who seemed so interested yesterday did not buy today. There are shelves of books dealing with this problem in book stores. The reasons that sales people typically provide are at the very least predictable.

Do any of these replies sound familiar?

• Your price is too high!
• We need to “think it over”!
• We have decided to postpone this for now!
• We have decided to stay with our current provider!
• We chose another company!

If you had a stock portfolio that was under-performing the overall market would you keep dumping time and money into those stocks? I seriously doubt it. What you would do is you assess what you have that is working, and then determine what to keep and what to eliminate… you would cut your losses with regard to what is really an under-performing asset. Why would you approach your marketing tactics any differently?

Place Your Focus on the Plan

For our clients opportunity is not a viable strategy to business development. Our clients believe in the creation of plans, plans that are both realistic and achievable; plans that establish measurable goals and provide personal accountability. Our clients wake up every morning knowing what action items have to be accomplished, and understand how these activities align with their overall long term mission.

Can you honesty argue that your marketing and sales goals are clearly defined, understood throughout your company, and are being achieved? If not perhaps it’s time for you to seriously consider a change in your company’s approach to marketing. Beginning with the overall vision and leading through the goals, strategies, and action items necessary to achieve a result that you will be proud of. And getting off of the unsustainable cycle of cold calling, frustration, and remorse and shifting your marketing spend into a more sustainable process.

It Must Be Measurable

Adopting new marketing tactics are always met with excitement until the revenue line doesn’t grow or the results are fuzzy and non-measurable. That has often been the case with traditional marketing tactics like direct mail, newspaper advertising, and road signs. And while good marketers have adapted internet marketing best practices like dedicated landing pages and QR codes to help strengthen these traditional practices provide and provide some analysis they really cannot compare to the quality and volume of data that can be generated from an inbound marketing approach.

Again, using the stock portfolio analogy, how long would you continue with an investment advisor if all you routinely saw were the fees s/he was charging you and not the performance of the portfolio? That is very similar to what many businesses are doing- paying the fees to pump out ad’s without being able to assess the impact that ad is having on their revenue growth.

Change Your Approach to Marketing

With the proper application of a well defined plan along with a robust inbound marketing platform (we recommend Hubspot® and use it ourselves) you can consolidate almost all of your marketing endeavors into a single software-driven process. The advantages to this approach are:

• You will project your company’s value proposition
• Your target audience will understand your company culture
• The value your company brings to your clients will be broadly and repetitively understood
• You will be able to quantify which tactics are most successful and where to shift your investment of time and talent

Perhaps best of all you will share that across a blog and different social media applications automatically and seamlessly. You will now have the ability to:

• Create and/or enhance the awareness in your brand that rivals the best public relations tactics
• Repetitively establish your credibility
• Provide opportunities for interested parties to become qualified prospects
• Maintain a high level of engagement over time
• Understand where in the sales process your investment in training and continuing education needs to be applied

Get the Facts

We have a comprehensive e-book that illustrates the inbound marketing process in great detail, and would love to share it with you. To obtain your copy, with no strings attached and no sales person phone calls, just complete the short form, above, right.

And if you would like to schedule an initial assessment of your current website and see an inbound marketing quotient just drop us an email and request a complimentary consultation.

Accounting Firms and Inbound Marketing- Sustainability in Marketing

Tweet

 

Your business development or sales organization has been very busy. Think about all that time spent drafting emails, responding to voice mails, writing proposals with little or no real relevance, pitching to non-decision makers and not holding prospects accountable to commitments… in actuality that is a lot of time NOT spent selling, it is time spent chasing!

What percentage of the overall time of your sales efforts are actually spent actually selling with new prospects? And how does your brand and/or credibility suffer from these typical but common sales activities?

Time is Your Most Valuable Asset

Consider the impact on your top line revenue if you were able to reduce the time either you or your sales people spend chasing procrastinators.

Consider the impact on your growth if you were able to double your actual time spent selling (most sales people are only in front of new prospects (outside the scope of your existing core client base).

Here is a hint: an improvement of 5%-20% of the time equates to 2-8 appointments/hours per week.

What would this translate into with regards to gross sales?

There is a marketing process that can shorten the sales cycle and dramatically improve conversion and close rates. When properly deployed it can eradicate all those annoying time wasters many sales people get stuck with while providing your brand or product with a significant boost in credibility. The common term is content marketing or inbound marketing. More about that in a minute…

How Is Time Utilized in the Sales Process?

Just think about the amount of time that gets invested into:

• prospecting and networking
• engaging
• presenting
• writing proposals

This is usually followed by the big chase with the “prospect”… and then you come to discover that your sales people were on a big fishing expedition!

Sooner or later every business owner will realize the importance of addressing this situation.

Quite often traditional sales people sit back after all of the hours of prospecting, pitching, presenting, proposal writing and chasing and go over in their own minds why the prospect, who seemed so interested yesterday did not buy today. There are shelves of books dealing with this problem in book stores. The reasons that sales people typically provide are at the very least predictable.

Do any of these replies sound familiar?

• Your price is too high!
• We need to “think it over”!
• We have decided to postpone this for now!
• We have decided to stay with our current provider!
• We chose another company!

If you had a stock portfolio that was under-performing the overall market would you keep dumping time and money into those stocks? I seriously doubt it. What you would do is you assess what you have that is working, and then determine what to keep and what to eliminate… you would cut your losses with regard to what is really an under-performing asset. Why would you approach your marketing tactics any differently?

Place Your Focus on the Plan

For our clients opportunity is not a viable strategy to business development. Our clients believe in the creation of plans, plans that are both realistic and achievable; plans that establish measurable goals and provide personal accountability. Our clients wake up every morning knowing what action items have to be accomplished, and understand how these activities align with their overall long term mission.

Can you honesty argue that your marketing and sales goals are clearly defined, understood throughout your company, and are being achieved? If not perhaps it’s time for you to seriously consider a change in your company’s approach to marketing. Beginning with the overall vision and leading through the goals, strategies, and action items necessary to achieve a result that you will be proud of. And getting off of the unsustainable cycle of cold calling, frustration, and remorse and shifting your marketing spend into a more sustainable process.

It Must Be Measurable

Adopting new marketing tactics are always met with excitement until the revenue line doesn’t grow or the results are fuzzy and non-measurable. That has often been the case with traditional marketing tactics like direct mail, newspaper advertising, and road signs. And while good marketers have adapted internet marketing best practices like dedicated landing pages and QR codes to help strengthen these traditional practices provide and provide some analysis they really cannot compare to the quality and volume of data that can be generated from an inbound marketing approach.

Again, using the stock portfolio analogy, how long would you continue with an investment advisor if all you routinely saw were the fees s/he was charging you and not the performance of the portfolio? That is very similar to what many businesses are doing- paying the fees to pump out ad’s without being able to assess the impact that ad is having on their revenue growth.

Change Your Approach to Marketing

With the proper application of a well defined plan along with a robust inbound marketing platform (we recommend Hubspot® and use it ourselves) you can consolidate almost all of your marketing endeavors into a single software-driven process. The advantages to this approach are:

• You will project your company’s value proposition
• Your target audience will understand your company culture
• The value your company brings to your clients will be broadly and repetitively understood
• You will be able to quantify which tactics are most successful and where to shift your investment of time and talent

Perhaps best of all you will share that across a blog and different social media applications automatically and seamlessly. You will now have the ability to:

• Create and/or enhance the awareness in your brand that rivals the best public relations tactics
• Repetitively establish your credibility
• Provide opportunities for interested parties to become qualified prospects
• Maintain a high level of engagement over time
• Understand where in the sales process your investment in training and continuing education needs to be applied

Get the Facts

We have a comprehensive e-book that illustrates the inbound marketing process in great detail, and would love to share it with you. To obtain your copy, with no strings attached and no sales person phone calls, just complete the short form, above, right.

And if you would like to schedule an initial assessment of your current website and see an inbound marketing quotient just drop us an email and request a complimentary consultation.

Inbound Marketing: the Best Way to Drive Sales to New Levels

Tweet

 

Do you sometimes feel like your company is using social media and blogging but not getting the volume of leads you had hoped for? Are you stressing over the decision to invest more time, talent, and treasure into your marketing effort?

Or are you stuck in the old cold-calling paradigm? Heck, can a company survive this way in today's marketplace?

Jason Fried, writing for INC., articulates: “Existing companies always weigh the costs of new technology or talent against what it already has and usually sticks with what is familiar. Why? Because the marginal costs of using what you have are almost always lower than the full costs of investing in something new.”1

Established decisions makers don't think in terms of marginal costs. New companies don't base decisions like inbound marketing adoption on costs at all - rather they tend to pick what is best for the business. It's the key reason new businesses often displace established ones.  They have better tools.

Several of our clients had established outbound sales processes in place, lacked an email database to completely support a pure inbound marketing campaign, and needed a more rapid ramp up than an inbound marketing initiation would have generated. But, they had the vision to realize that a sales process based solely on cold calling was becoming dysfunctional.

One of them, the President of a manufacturing company, had been impressed with some of the content we had shared with them, from a LinkedIn group, and reached out to us. Yup- they called us!

We created a plan to blend the client's outbound culture with the inbound marketing process. One of the biggest misconceptions we see in interviewing potential clients is the "either/or" mentality many people have regarding these two disciplines. Outbound tactics are a great way to support a sales organization that is light on email contacts and doesn’t want to buy lists (and potentially risk being labeled a spammer. The solution we devised was to utilize Hubspot® as an internet environment to create warm calls where they might have only been cold ones before.

Inbound marketing is at its best when it supports a traditional sales effort, not merely trying to replace it. And this is never more evident than within an existing business trying to survive by using only an outbound marketing process.

We then created personas of the client’s target audience, asking and evaluating where they "play". We Identified ways to reach them with our blog, social media content, along with traditional marketing tactics. For example an architectural firm we work with found success with not only regularly posting new content on their website but also because we re-purposed the material into a great print article, e-book, or white paper and used it as a compelling direct mail piece. We made certain to add a unique URL to track results, designed a landing page specific to that audience (and message) and added a strong call to action.  Where we used to have daily quotas of phone calls, and frustrated sales people (and equally frustrated decision makers) we now have a process to drive more inbound leads plus we have the ability to measure the traffic and convert leads into prospects before the sales people even pick up the phone.

We are also using advertising using trade publications and other periodicals that fit the persona of the target audience industries. We have assigned sales people to trade shows and networking events and have armed them with unique business cards and/or brochures designed for that purpose, again all driving to specifically tailored landing pages.

And more often than not when the sales team acknowledges a response to a call to action and dials the phone the party on the other end is far more receptive to having a conversation. Our rate of new appointments has grown, and our close rates and new customer conversions will certainly follow. But that is on the sales manager… we are the outsourced marketing department, after all!

All of this has allowed the management team to consider eliminating sales territories all together and aligning salespeople into specific industries, creating expert solution providers not pitchy sales people. Imagine speaking with the sales person who has multiple success stories within your industry versus a guy who merely “handles your territory”!

Lastly, we could devote an entire article (perhaps we should) on the enhancements to organic search results as a byproduct of all of this new inbound traffic. A financial planning we enjoy working with previously invested around a thousand dollars monthly to improve their search engine results through SEO-generating activities.  With the use of good inbound marketing processes that company’s website ranking naturally improved, ultimately providing them with even more interested lead conversion opportunities.

Inbound marketing requires a good amount of time to generate momentum. Companies lacking a large existing email database to work with can see success with the adaptation of traditional marketing and sales methods to drive traffic and conversions is a great way to build the eventually conversion to an inbound only approach.

And it is far more efficient than cold calling on its own.

1- INC Magazine, October 2012 page 35

Hunterdon County Business Expo - How to Make the Most of Your Time

Tweet

 

Are you attending the upcoming Chamber of Commerce Expo and Restaurant Showcase on October 16? Would you like to insure you generate a return on your investment of time at this show, the only trade show of its kind in Hunterdon County?

You will get a more value if you have a game plan going in. Here are several tips for people who are planning to attend the Expo.

What Are Your Objectives?

Why attend the EXPO? Defining your objectives will help you prepare and you will find your time at the event more productive. Some of the things you might want to accomplish include:

• Looking for collaboration or partnership opportunities between your business and other companies
• Find a great service or product provider for your home or business
• Get some face time with local business people, important clients, prospective new clients, or even your neighbors
• Bringing back some best practices office so your execution at other similar events can improve

By setting objectives now, and developing a plan to accomplish them, you can not only streamline your approach accordingly but utilize your resources more efficiently.

Look at the EXPO Website Now

Every show publishes a list of exhibitors and the Chamber of Commerce has a great website for the EXPO. Just point your browser to www.hunterdonexpo.com and click on exhibitors. Take the time to identify the companies you know you want to meet (maybe a business partnership opportunity or a service you’d like to explore) or observe (maybe your competition is exhibiting there). Look for potential service providers that you want to speak with, perhaps even setting up an appointment with them in advance to get more of their time and attention.

Have a New Perspective on Your Business Cards

Have you ever considered bringing business cards with a different email address to a show? This works! There’s value in developing ongoing relationships with vendors and exhibitors relevant to your needs, but you also don’t want your primary email address flooded with spam or sales offers. If you complete the event registration and print a small supply of business cards with a different email address you’ll still get lots of great information but you can also redirect everything into a separate folder with Email Rules for reading later.

Jog the First Few Miles

I used to regularly attend three and four day trade shows. Las Vegas, Milan (Italy), Frankfurt (Germany) to name a few. I would always have a list of those booths or suppliers that I needed to meet with, but on the first day I would do a quick lap around the entire show–checking out booths, getting a sense for companies with something special  and taking notes of which booths I particularly wanted to come back to see. At any show, there will be vendors you didn’t know before, or established companies that do a particularly good job at educating and engaging their audience.

Don’t be Afraid to Say No… but Politely!

Exhibitors who really understand the sales process will train their booth staff to actively engage people in the aisle. If you’re interested by all means stop and have a conversation. But remember the importance of managing your time, and don’t be afraid to say “no thank you” and keep walking. Be polite and smile. The same goes for the uncomfortable situation where you suddenly realize the conversation has turned into an unwanted (or too early) sales pitch.

Think Again About all of the Giveaways

Do you really need it? It is probably not worth lugging around for the rest of the day.  If you are just going to throw it away later you’re just wasting someone’s money.

Visit Important Booths during the Lulls and You Will Get More Attention

Every show has an ebb and flow to it. Sometimes the activity level is fast and crowded, others, especially during meal times, seem quieter and slower. If your time on the show floor is mostly during the “busy” times booths will be chaotic and you may not get the time you need from the representatives. Instead, plan to come back when you can afford to miss something on the conference agenda (a talk, a celebrity appearance, or a workshop, for example). The booths will be far less busy, and reps will have more time to spend with you.

Look for the subject matter experts, and ask questions that will help you learn

Booths are usually staffed with sales reps, which can be a great source of information. A really good sales rep knows what is happening in their industry, and usually has a lot of great insider “gossip” about other companies. You can also seek out the real thought leaders and subject matter experts from each company. Do your homework in advance- find out who at each company is writing their blog posts, who is featured in their white papers, and who is quoted most often in their press releases. You might even check them out on their social media sites, and then ask for those people when you visit the booth.

All told, the time spent at the EXPO can be a fast and efficient way to build awareness of the many great local businesses, products, and services available to you.

Leadership: Does Your Company have a No-Texting Policy?

Tweet

 

Would you like to avoid the liability that employee accidents create while driving on the job, while improving the safety of your employees? We have all seen someone texting while they were driving, a huge problem on our roadways today. Trying to craft a mesage and key it into a 6" device is very distracting.

The solution may be establishing a no-texting-while-driving policy.

AT&T customers can download a Drive Mode app to help prevent this unsafe practice. This free app temporarily disables certain mobile device features, such as those distracting notification sounds when an incoming text message is received. People trying to reach you will simply receive an automatic response telling them that you'll reply to their message when it's safe to do so.

For now, DriveMode is only for Android and BlackBerry. An AT&T spokesperson Andrea Brands reports it has already been downloaded 51,000 times.

Another solution is Mobile TattleTale, available for Driod, iPhone, and Blackberry devices. This app offers many different functions, including speed control.

A survey by the Ad Council was recently released for “Stop the Texts Day,” from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the U.S. state attorneys general, and the Ad Council. It found that 60% of drivers surveyed said they’d texted while driving. Of that 60%, the majority said they’d continue to do so even knowing that TWD causes accidents.

Our company requires the use of hands-free devices like a speakerphone in conjunction with voice recognition software. We can place and receive calls or texts with the touch of one large button, on a device usually mounted on a visor. Simply speaking to it completes the action. But even with the use of this technology it can be challenging when driving on one of New Jersey's congested and fast roadways.

Protect your company, and your employees who drive for business, with a firm policy and the assistance of technology. And demonstrate your leadership ability by installing a no-texting-while-driving app on your device.

Top 4 Reasons Services Business Fail

Tweet

 

In this fast-paced world of business, mostly professional service firms such as lawyers, architects, structural engineers and financial service providers, are hesitant to move toward social media as a means for growing business. If your intent is to stay the course with your current marketing and sales methodologies, you are probably also defining yourself through the use of these following top 4 reasons for failure. 

After all, none of these business sectors seem very alluring, fun or exciting. As valuable as these products and services may be, they aren’t top of mind services of which people are routinely in need.  Banks and other financial institutions may be, but most have shied away from the new marketing, and are constantly being absorbed, merged, bought and sold.  Their focus is elsewhere.

Besides, there are established means and marketing methods that are tried and true; at least that is the current thinking, like these top 4 statements, right?

1. If it (marketing) ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Why should we convert from traditional marketing when it has served us so well in the past.   Besides, social media just isn’t for us, right?  It is no matter than even though 87% of adults that use the internet that have an investment account use social media as well as use the internet to manage their accounts (Forrester Research). 

We use our website as nothing more than a digital brochure, even though it has been proven that a static website is like a billboard in the desert. Additionally, traditional advertising has worked well for us, so why rock the boat?  It really doesn’t matter that as the market ages, our customers of the future will be entirely immersed in the digital experience.

2. We believe in our existing customer base’s demographics and psychographics.  That will not change.

We, as a business, have relied on our customer’s loyalty for generations.  Surely that won’t change.  It doesn’t matter that even though the world has gone crazy over the internet and social media, we, as a traditional business have little need to change the way we do things. Our customers introduce their children to our firm, and their children will become our clients over time.

Ours is a business of referrals, and therefore there is no need to utilize marketing methods that are here today, gone tomorrow.  Social media is just a fad.  The stories about Social Media being the New Word of Mouth are fiction; not to be relied upon.

3. Treat customer service and loyalty programs as expense departments.

The more we solicit customer opinions, the more it costs us to satisfy them.  Maintaining the status quo is cheaper than actively promoting loyalty and customer interaction.  Surveys performed by American Express clearly point out that customers that use social media are more demanding, will cancel a purchase of they have a bad social media experience.  The same survey also says they spend 21 percent more with companies that have a social media customer service program, and are more loyal; it can’t be true, can it?

4. Social media is a waste of time, money and effort.

Social media is confusing and the expense hasn’t proved itself yet.  Regardless of the report produced by Adobe’s Digital Index report, it says social media is still evolving.  Waiting until it is completely understood by the masses is a prudent decision, right?

It’s obvious that this article is meant to poke holes in the theory of the status quo when it comes to marketing in the digital age.  Frankly, we see too many small to medium sized services businesses that don’t execute the traditional model very well. If your business has suffered from any of these types of thinking, you may be in serious trouble... or denial.  Regardless of the industry you play in, there is well-identified value to be found in social media and inbound marketing.  The traditional model of lead generation is no longer working as it used to.  The inherent cost of traditional marketing is far more than inbound marketing, and digital marketing produces more loyalty and greater referral clients. 

Isn’t it time to take another look at inbound marketing?

Inbound Marketing is the Fuel Source for Successful Sales Teams

Tweet

 

In your organization, is customer acquisition a “Seek” or “Get Found” mentality? If it is the latter, then you are ready for inbound marketing. If your firm’s belief system is that the sales department is responsible for lead generation, then, I am sorry to say, you just don’t get it. I don’t mean that to be rude, but factual. Most, if not all organizations, can effectively use an inbound marketing strategy included in their overall marketing.

Twenty-first century marketing is about “Getting Found,” so that your sales department has interested, warm leads with which to work. When all of the components of a robust, inbound marketing program are synchronized with your sales process, great things begin to happen. Not only is sales volume increased, but also costs decrease and Return on Investment improves. Don’t believe me, check out these statistics at MacLabs.

Successful sales teams operate in a constant state of "evolvement", especially now that most customers are researching their own potential purchases online. Sure, there are those stuck in the inkpot and quill stage, but the vast majority of today and tomorrow’s client base is operating in the digital realm. What is important to note, however, is that this methodology closes the gap on the sales process by producing candidates interested in what you have to say, and minimizes the cost and frustrations of cold calling, direct mail, and other forms of the traditional marketing methodology.

Between the current economic storm in which we live, as well as the growth of social media and inbound marketing strategies, you are facing issues that require immediate action just in order to survive. Not only is your marketing department challenged with improving the quality of leads for the sales department, they must do so under intense pressure to perform. Each revenue dollar is of maximum importance, and it can be difficult to determine where to place your shrinking marketing resources for the greatest impact and return. Marketing must produce the highest possible quality leads with the least expensive methods. The sales pipeline, filled with warm leads can result in a lower cost per lead, higher conversion to sales, and greater ROI. Industry giants have taken on the mantle of inbound marketing, and are ramping up their overall marketing strategies to include content generation, social media, webinars, video presentations and “persona” interactions, but what marketing strategies are best?

It is now becoming a widely accepted statement that social media is the “new” word of mouth advertising. The rapid adoption of blogging and social media as an integral part of organizational marketing objectives equates to those companies that simply “get it.” While no panacea, blogging and social media are an important facet in twenty-first century marketing. This type of marketing is the true fuel to sales generation, and successful sales teams understand this. As prospects come to organizations, having already researched the firm, the product and the corporate philosophy, it makes good sense to have the ability to conduct an intelligent conversation with them in a language they understand. Through the provision of engaging content, informative presentations, and relationship building, robust inbound marketing campaigns can better predict results.

The following rhetorical questions and statements are offered for your thought and for your consideration. If even one of them raises an eyebrow, or poses a concern, you should consider speaking with a professional inbound marketing agency today.

• How have the buying and selling processes changed, and why your understanding this is so important.
• Inbound marketing empowers the customer engagement process through awareness, inquiry, consideration, relationship, and purchase and customer retention. Is this process actively at work in your group?
• Do you presently have the capacity to forecast your marketing budget in relation to Return on Investment?
• How does compelling, engaging information (content) generate higher quality leads and quicker sales conversions?
• Inbound marketing strategies can be time consuming, but produce dramatically improved results over time. What is the financial impact?
• What are the considerations to include in the decision to “go inbound?”

As businesses and brands, we are at the mercy of the marketplace more now than ever. Conversations about our company brands are happening across the digital landscape, regardless of our approval and often without our knowledge. This new “word of mouth” is actively occurring. Social media will make heroes of some, while turning others into goats. Without active involvement in the dialogue, we have no say in the outcomes of those discussions. A comprehensive inbound marketing strategy provides an opportunity to have your say, inform, persuade, and defend your "reason for being" in the business space with which you play

If you are ready to see a detailed approach to how a robust inbound marketing process can make your sales organization more efficient, and more productive, contact Zen Marketing Inc. today.