How much do you want to have a freelance writing business?

Do you know how tough it can get along the way?

Laura has taken her many years of experience and put them all into a wonderful eBook. Now, you can have a mentor and a guide who will take you through the process of starting your own freelance writing business. Not only that, but all the valuable experience and knowledge that has taken her years to learn, is all yours within hours [reading]. So, do go take a look at Laura’s How To Start A Freelance Writing Business immediately!

Sorry, this is so totally off-topic, but you guys really really gotta see this!

Transformer USB

One of the most interesting aspects of sales and marketing, and also the most difficult, is to get more sales. Others might say that the more difficult part of it is not to just sell, but to find loyal customers.

When you think about it, it is all true. It is hard enough trying to get a new customer, then losing them and trying to win them over a 2nd time is going to be even more difficult.

Customer loyalty is priceless. But we all need to be accountable, hence, the birth of “Total Lifetime Value” of a customer. So many concepts, so many ideas.

But I just came across a very interesting article over at the Corporate Eye – Disney’s Discount Slight of Hand that has put a new spin on a lot of these ideas.

You see, one of the bright ideas when it comes to pricing is this whole area of psychological pricing. You know, where ninety-seven cents is better price for sales conversion than ninety-nine?

An extension of this is small increases in prices of small items go un-noticed and can allow you to give big discounts on big ticket items to make the top level appeal so much stronger.

But as Susan pointed out in her excellent article, that could very well back-fire on the loyal customers. Those who know every item that is on the menu at your restaurants, those who know the names of every staff, those who know which days are “Specials” day; you cannot fool them.

So, the next time you plan your marketing, do take this into consideration.

I just saw this very interesting post over at the Versa Blog. It was talking about some sales guru who appeared to have the monopoly on great sales technique… I’m a skeptic, but if Vivienne feels it is good, then there must be something to it. Go read it at Meeting the Heart Sales Guru

Times, they are bad indeed. So I guess any boost that you can give to improve sales would be an improvement. Right?

Here is an interesting one – how do you think out of the box? More importantly, how do managers and business owners get their people to think out of the box?

Whether you are in marketing, sales, or operations; the ability to think out of the box is very important, right? Wrong.

Our entire education has been geared towards putting us INTO a box. We are taught the Laws of Physics, we are taught the Rules of Grammer and we are taught there is only one right answer – the one that scores the marks during an examination.

When you first start working, you are taught to toe the line, that your boss is always right; my way or the highway…

Suddenly, you are asked to think out of the box. Sure, you can do it, just tell me… which box?

That is the irony of it all. Bosses want employees who can toe the line, be team players, not rock the boat; then, when the going gets tough, you suddenly want these self-same people to think out of the box?

“Yes, Sir! Certainly Sir! What box might that be sir!?”

Creativity, initiative and so on is not a one-time exercise. It has to be part of the work culture, part of the value system. Nurture is important.

If you want your people to think out of the box, the easiest way to achieve this is as follows:

Don’t create the box in the first place.

Isn’t it interesting that “marketing” and “measuring” are such poor bed partners?

Accountability is an area of management that is looked upon by many as a necessary evil. You see, these people are usually employees. Measuring simply adds another list of things to do. After going through all the sweat and toil, they now have to write reports, do up some charts and be accountable.

Marketing is one area that is notorious for a lack of accountability. It is hard to measure. To some extend, it is true. But to a large extend, it is an excuse. Now, when times are bad, economy is slowing down and there is a “crisis”, suddenly, everyone wants to know how well they are doing.

It is perfectly possible to measure your marketing results. You just need to use the right methods to fit the right objectives.

Quantify your objectives, decide how you will measure them, collect the data that you need to meet the objectives, establish a baseline, gain commitment to the measurement plan, and, finally, measure.

Quantify your objectives

You must be able to state in a measurable format, your objectives. For example, “We want to get more sales lead” is not a good quantification. The word “more” is ambigous and unclear. A better objective would be “We want to have 200 people sign up for our newsletter”.

What and How you will measure

When you measure, you must pick a measurement that is going to be relevant to your business. Following up from the above example, how will 200 people subscribing to your newsletter affect your business? If it has minimal impact, why measure it at all? It is difficult for marketing campaigns to be linked directly to sales, but it is possible. For example, discount coupons can tell us who made a purchase as a result of which promotion. The method of capturing your data is important. Coupons can be counted, but not always reliable. But discounts are accounted for through the sales receipts and will be an excellent way to counter check.

Establish baseline

A baseline is important so that you will be able to tell whether you are doing better or worse over time. If you already have a baseline, good. If not, you need to create one. For example, if you have 5000 coupons redeemed at the last promotion, that could become a baseline. Or you can have an average over several promotions and you know that any marketing that falls below that is “below average”.

Gain commitment

Everyone must be committed to measuring your marketing success. If the sales people feel that it is not important, they might not bother with the coupons, or they might not submit the subscription forms. Worse, everyone is doing their best, but the boss ignores the efforts.

Collect Data

Collecting the data is as simple as establishing a procedure by which it can be done. Once this is briefed and everyone is trained, it is then up to the whole team to make sure that the data is duly collected and used.

Marketing is all about results. Everyone knows that. But until you start to measure it, then anything and everything you say is nothing more than words.

More reading:
http://www.marketingprofs.com/8/tackling-marketing-accountability-patterson-kushner.asp?adref=znnpbsc598

This is like Atlantis. Everyone has heard of it, but no one seems to be able to find it.

I really want to clarify something. You see, I have been hearing many people speak of Zero Cost Marketing; and that is so very wrong. By all the laws of nature and of commerce, how can there ever be anything of value for free? There is no such thing as Zero Cost Marketing.

Having said that, you must also know that there is such a thing as Zero Dollar Marketing. You see, it is possible to get things done without spending a single cent. How is this different from Zero Cost?

Your time, your staff’s time, talents and efforts – these are all “costs”. To get anything done, you need to spend time and effort. You might not need to spend dollars. In that sense, it is possible to have Zero Dollar Marketing, but certainly not zero cost marketing.

Why is this interesting?

As more and more corporations move towards greater accountability, Marketing Metrics have become more important. Measuring the returns on your marketing efforts is the new cool. You can no longer hide behind the “… it won an award” thing to justify your campaigns.

More and more, managers and business owners look at performance. They try to measure what is spent vs what results are generated. Simply put, an ROI model that divides results by marketing dollars spent will look fantastic when the dollars are very low. And as you Maths teacher would tell you, it will “tend to infinity as it approaches zero”.

Zero Dollar Marketing is even more important today because:

• Marketing is now more accountable than ever before for solid returns
• Marketing is under more pressure than ever before during this economic downturn
• Marketers need to demonstrate positive contribution
• Companies and businesses need to save every dollar they can

Do you or your company employ Zero Dollar Marketing techniques?

Alright, its acronym time! F.E.A.R is the word and I would love to hear what you have to say about it.

As we face bad times, most likely, we make the bad times worse. Fear is one of the culprits. Like the deer staring at the headlights of an oncoming car, we are sometimes so paralysed by fear that we fail to act. As human beings, we pride ourselves on our ability to be rational, to be sentient even. We are supposed to be able to recognise danger, analyse it and then find a solution.

That sounds really good when it is someone else’s problems. But when we are faced with it ourselves, we experience fear at a whole new level. Everyone is fearful at this time, in one way or another, at some level. Just wanted to share this with all of you:

Fear is a falshood that robs you of reason
Expect the worse and it will happen just as you planned
Act positively and fight as fear is a coward that flees
Reality is usually quite boring and mundane when not tainted by fear

May 2009 bring you many new challenges, opportunities and be as exciting as the wild roller coaster that it has turned out to be. See you on the other side!

You know, one of the most silliest, stupidest piece of “wisdom” I have given over the years, was that people should be spending more marketing dollars during a recession as that was an opportunity to quickly win ground.

Well, we are all slipping and sliding down the merry slope of one of the worse recessions in recent history. Eating my words seem not as bad when compared to the disaster I would be facing if I failed to learn.

Reading Vivienne’s “Farmer or Hunter During Economic Winter” post, made me realise how silly my lofty thoughts actually were.

In winter, the bleak weather forbids us to do anything. We cannot go out with impunity, no matter how warmly we dress. Even well prepared, it is dangerous and life-threatening to step out. Farmers take winter time to rest, make repairs, enjoy quality time with family and friends. There is no point going out to sow. The ground is too hard to till. There is no point in doing anything much. All they can do is conserve their energy and resources and be ready to hit the ground running when spring comes around.

So, how do you do marketing in a recession? For sure, you cannot just stop everything. But prudence is definitely required. You cannot afford to squander your resources and your marketing strength. Yet, to hide away until winter is over is not right too. One of the best parts of winter must surely be the festivals that go on in and around the villages. The Christians celebrate Christmas, the Celtics the Yule festival, Chinese celebrate Dong Zhi and there are many more such festivals created around farming communities.

Back to what we should be doing. Knowing what we now know, we need to conserve our resources. Sticking to our famer analogy, repairs need to be made, relationships need to be rekindled, preparations need to be under way for the coming of spring.

Translated to marketing talk:

- Customer Service needs to be maintained. This means that you should not cut back so much that your customer service excellence is compromised
- Communications need to be maintained. While you may no longer wish to run full page spreads, periodic advertising is still needed. Other methods of communications like a web site, a corporate blog, or a corporate newsletter would also work.
- Plan your next campaign. Good marketing campaigns take time and effort. Most of the time, in the heat of the battle for market share and business, we rush through it all. This is a good opportunity to take time to hone your next marketing campaign.

If I were a poor farmer, I might not have that much spare cash to do a lot during winter, but all of the above can be done to some extend. Especially the online marketing stuff, they can be done for little or no cost and it would be a crime to neglect them.

Anyone who has ever done product management, product marketing or just tried to create their own product or services will understand the problem.

When people are used to doing something in a certain way, it is hard to change. It took almost 50 years for the Telephone to become accepted and used. When the PC first replaced the type writer, jokes of putting white-out on monitor screens abound.

Now, the problem is not just about people adapting to the product. Sometimes, in the product creation process, the creators themselves are stuck in a known paradigm. Then, it becomes a problem that grows in complexity. Why?

Within a fixed and known environment, there are rules and assumptions. Trying to do something different not only affects the thing that you are attempting to change, but will affect all the supporting elements surrounding it. It is hard to explain, but let me try to use this example of flying cars.

For many years, ever since the invention of aeroplanes, there have been dreams that one day, there will be a flying car. So, designers have been trying to create just such a product. Cars with capabilities of an aeroplane, to fly. Aeroplanes with the capability of cars, to be driven on roads. Some created a helicopter modification.

You see, these creators are now stuck in the following boxes: car, flying, aeroplanes, helicopter.

What happens next is predictable. Aviation rules need to be explored. Traffic jams are bad, but at least, we can wait it out. Aerial traffic jams would be disastrous, even if the flying cars could hover. In fact, now, we can have “traffic accidents” in all three dimensions. The entire concept is mired in a lot of other issues

This is what I was talking about when you try to innovate a product. By creating a product innovation, you turn the entire eco-system upside down. Nothing that supports the proper functioning of the system (road transportation) will work because a fundamental has been changed.

One method of breaking out of the box is to take a daring step and be “silly”. For example, all the innovation so far have been focused on the car – to make it fly. Frankly, that is no longer a challenge. Personal flying is already possible. Small tiny personal planes. But they do not “replace” the car in the way envisioned. So, to get out of the box, let us imagine that we now innovate… the road.

How about that? Change the concept of “air traffic lanes” and make them literal?

My simple take: road with electro-magnetic fields, cars with corresponding capbilities and you get floating cars. Multi-tier the roads, adapt the concepts of on-ramp and off-ramps and you can have a much more complex “road” system. Car parks of course will have to adop similar changes.

Of course, this is a silly idea as it will entail billions of dollars. But it is possible.

My point is, sometimes, solutions outside the box are dismissed because people take one look at it and say:

1. That is silly
2. That looks like a railroad (or whatever is equivalent in each scenario)
3. That is not as good a solution

But mostly, we are trapped in our own little boxes. So, want to be the next Alex Bell, Bill Gates or the Wright Brothers… then dare to be “silly”.

Have a fantastic new year in 2009!

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2008 is over. Looking back, it has been in unbelievable year.

But looking ahead, it is going be be even more interesting. Everyday ahead is going to be more exciting than the one before.

To help us move on positively, Vivienne has shared this interesting post on “Completing 2008, Creating 2009” which really is food for thought as we wait to greet 2009 on New Year’s Eve. OK, even if you are jumping and partying, these are still cool questions to ask!

Happy New Year everyone!

Yes! I am off to my Christmas Party! See you guys after my hangover week!