Three handy ‘bots’ you can use in your small business right now
“Set thermostat to 68 degrees.” My friend was talking to Siri via his Apple watch. It was one of those early spring days when the direction the temperature is going to go is anyone’s guess. It turned out to be a warm day and he was getting hot in his upstairs office. Instead of abandoning what he was working on, chugging down the stairs, and resetting the temperature the way his parents did, he told Siri to take care of it for him. He happens to have his home controlled by the Apple Home ecosystem, but the same thing could just as easily be accomplished via Amazon’s Alexa. There are a wide variety of tasks that these “digital assistants” can perform for you, from sending messages, scheduling meetings, checking travel arrangements, and much more. Rob Marvin has listed 23 “must-have” Alexa skills in his article for PC Magazine. And while I’m not a big fan of multi-tasking in the usual sense of the term, many of the tasks performed by these bots are exceptions to my rule. Here’s what I mean: You can off load a job to Siri or Alexa in a way that lets you avoid interrupting the task at hand. The example I started this with illustrates this point. Or perhaps you want to get in a good session on your stationary bicycle, you can use Siri or Alexa to respond to text messages or emails without having to stop exercising. GrowthBot I’ve written about Hubspot’s GrowthBot before. It’s a bot that will answer a wide variety of marketing questions for you. I initially discovered it in the Slack environment. (Slack is a messaging app on steroids for businesses, in case you haven’t been introduced to it yet.) However, I know that a lot of you are not using Slack, so I was pleased when GrowthBot became available via text message. I established a text message relationship with GrowthBot today and here’s what our initial conversation looked like: The sample commands GrowthBot suggested to me, give you a great idea of how handy it can be to improve your marketing. You can use it to do some great competitive research, for example. Send the message “hello” to 617-202-2112 to get started. Facebook messenger chat bot Facebook is now allowing businesses to use chatbots in the Facebook Messenger system. This opens up a lot of possibilities. The power of a chatbot in Facebook Messenger is that it “learns” from the responses people make. If you produce a weekly newsletter, for example, you could use a Facebook chatbot to send out a notice that it has been published and ask which articles individuals want to read. From that information, you could learn the individual preferences of your subscribers and better target future advertising materials. (By the way, after originally prohibiting marketing and promotional messages, Facebook eased up on its rules. You’ll find good guidance on what’s allowed in this blog article written for Facebook developers. Be sure to check out the “comparison of messaging types” section.) To get a Facebook chatbot into your tool box, you can hire someone to develop one for you, or you can go the DIY route, as detailed in this article by Ben Beck. I’ve basically organized this article from the easiest to...
read moreFor micromarketing examples, look no further than The Village People
When I think of micromarketing examples, the first image that always comes to mind is The Village People. (I don’t get up out of my chair and start doing the movement to YMCA, but that probably wouldn’t be a bad way to get a little exercise while working at my computer.) To command good margins on your product or service, you must identify and reach the niche markets who recognize the special appeal of your offerings. Here’s why I think The Village People illustrate both the successes and failures related to micromarketing. Every member of The Village People is a stereotypical hyper-masculine male. But at the same time, each member has a more “granular” identity – a cop, biker, military man, Native American, construction worker, and cowboy. It’s not hard to imagine a company marketing a new product designed to appeal to “masculine men” believing that they had properly defined their target audience. However, if that company broke down the market further and pulled together a micromarketing strategy, achieving success might come more quickly. In recent years, there has been a lot of emphasis on creating your ideal customer avatar. (Kate Erickson gives a good rundown on the process in this EOFire article.) But I urge you not to stop at merely defining one customer. As I’ve shown above, if your customer was the macho male, you should be able to break that down even further. As you discover and define these micromarkets, you will be challenged to create marketing materials and strategies to meet each micromarket and you might also discover that some tweaks to your product or service are required to fulfill the needs of each group. These points demonstrate how micromarkets represent growth opportunities. Making small changes to products, services, materials, and strategies to target different micromarkets can pave your way to continual growth. You know that old saying about not putting your eggs in one basket? By identifying and selling to additional micromarkets – maybe you start with the cowboy, then go to the Native American, then the cop, and next the military man, etch – you create several different, but closely related, baskets. This paves your road to growth. When that happens, it will be like The Village People sing in YMCA, “You can make real your dreams!” Image: VPSTartfront, by BikerFan22 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia...
read moreUse Password Day to renew your online security
Happy Password Day! Or, at least I hope it’s a happy one for you. I know that for many denizens of the online world, today won’t be so happy, and it seems that almost every day there’s a story making headlines that reminds us of this point. One of the latest big Internet security (or lack of security) stories lately has been the theft of Netflix’s new season of “Orange is the New Black.” But just because we only hear about it when major organizations get hacked, don’t think that the bad guys are going to give your somewhat smaller company a pass – because they won’t. Further, it might not be Russian hackers that get you, it could be an angry ex-employee, ex-girlfriend, ex-boyfriend, ex-spouse, or just some middle-school digital savant out to prove a point. In many of these cases, the first, and most important line of defense, is establishing good password habits. I want to take the occasion of Password Day to share a couple of important articles that have previously appeared on these pages and then direct you to a list of good password managers so that when this day comes around again next year, you will be employing the highest levels of password security. Healthy password habits While I strongly recommend using a password manager, I know that some of you are going to resist the idea…even though there are freemiums on the market that would do the trick for many users. If you absolutely, positively, refuse to take the time to compare the various password managers available to you, please review the important password habits and strategies I outline in this article. Also, at the end of the article I provide a link to a webpage where you can check the strength of any password. A plug for password managers We have been very fortunate over the last few years to have Internet security expert Robert Siciliano write guest articles for us and he has tackled the topic of password managers on a couple of occasions: Password Managers First Step in Online Security How Password Managers Make Your Accounts Secure Robert does an excellent job making the case for using a password manager, but he goes beyond that and gives you the information you need to understand how they work, why a third-party app is superior to your browser-based system, how they make life easier, and a lot more details that will help overcome your reluctance to take the password manager plunge. Comparing the password managers There are several excellent password managers on the market and almost all of them have plans that cover levels from the single user to families to businesses. Further, the basic plans are often free. Spend some time comparing features before you make your choice, because once you settle on a provider, you want to be able to stick with it for the long term. Below is a chart with the most widely used password managers. The ratings are from GetApp and you can head over there if you want to read some user reviews. A link to each app website is provided in the chart. App Reviews Rating Cost Personal Business LastPass 86 4.8 $0-$4 monthly X X 1Password 34 4.4 $3-$5 monthly X X Zoho Valut 2...
read moreThe Essentials: Mastering brand advertising vs direct response advertising
One of the most important concepts to understand when promoting your business is the natural tensions between brand advertising (branding) and direct response advertising. When you receive a mailer telling you that your local Ford dealer is having a year-end clearance sale, that is direct response advertising. After the sale is over, the dealer can review receipts and quantify consumer “response” to the advertisement. When you’re watching a Sunday afternoon football game and Ford runs a commercial showing its trucks slashing through mud puddles and ends with the announcer solemnly intoning, “Built Ford Tough,” that’s brand advertising. Over the long term, Ford management can look at truck sales and see if their brand strategy is working, but truck sales won’t spike after the commercials that run during Sunday NFL games. Here’s a comparison of some of the purposes and features of brand advertising and direct response advertising: The important point to understand is that direct response advertising won’t work unless it is preceded by brand advertising, and this principle becomes increasingly important as the value of the product or service increases. Many consumers may be willing to take a chance on an “off-brand” box of pencils that are on sale, but few will make major purchases without first having some confidence and understanding of the brand. Branding – or “marketing” – is a continual process. You must always be making your brand increasingly familiar to your market as well as teaching your prospects the important differences between you and your competitors. Sales and the promotion of a specific product or service come and go. In fact, a time-limiting attribute in advertising is your best friend: Hurry, sale ends Friday! For the first 100 shoppers… New clients get 10 percent off their first visit all month These kinds of “hooks” are never part of branding. One of the biggest mistakes small business owners can make is to think that by blasting a group of prospects with an ad that touts a low price, they can make sales. Unless the prospects have been convinced of the general goodness of the product or service before receiving the low-price offer, the advertisement will fall on deaf ears. And here’s the tragedy in this scenario: The business owner may conclude that the offer was bad when in fact, the problem was that they hadn’t done enough good brand advertising to prepare the way for the special offer. Take a moment to review the chart above and consider the differences between brand advertising and direct response advertising. Then consider how you can use both of these promotional strategies together to grow your business....
read moreEmail marketing secrets: Use your RSS feed for instant content
Wouldn’t it be great if you could get content into your email newsletter without lifting a finger? Wouldn’t it be even better if you could automatically create and send newsletters with fresh content without having to put the newsletter together yourself every time? If you have a website and publish blog content on a regular, basis you can easily accomplish these “automations.” The key is knowing how to take advantage of your RSS feed. What is RSS? RSS stands for “rich site summary” or “really simple syndication” and it’s a way for people or other websites can receive new content from you automatically. Frankly, I don’t think RSS feeds are as popular with users as they were a few years ago, but they’re still around. Your browser may have an RSS “reader” built into it. Some people use third-party RSS readers. These allow you to “subscribe” to the blogs you’re really interested in and then receive a “digest” version of recent articles with links to the full articles. With my little primer on RSS feeds out of the way, let’s look at how they can be leveraged in your email marketing campaigns. RSS feed-driven emails To put it simply, many email marketing services – such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, and others – have built-in ways to grab content from your RSS feed and automatically put it into emails. MailChimp and Zoho give you the ability to automatically create and send emails when you publish new content via your RSS feed. The screen shots below show you the main screens for setting this up in MailChimp. When you navigate in MailChimp to the “create campaign” screen, you are presented with a drop-down menu that allows you to set the type of campaign you wish to create. You’ll find RSS at the bottom of the menu. Next, you need to input the URL of your RSS feed and select the days you want the email to be distributed. It will only create a new email when it finds new content on your RSS feed, so if you check the boxes for every day of the week but don’t create new content every day, it won’t send emails with old content out to your email list. You’ll go through various setup steps such as defining your subject line and then be taken to the overall design of the email. The block containing the code for pulling in your RSS feed will be preloaded, but you can add other elements, perhaps your mission statement or other content that you don’t need to change very often. Be sure you test your email before allowing it to go live/ Adding RSS content to your emails Constant Contact doesn’t offer full campaigns based solely on RSS feeds, but it does have a feature that allows you to pull in content from your RSS feed. This can save you the hassle of cutting and pasting content and creating links from blogs. You simply add a content block to your email, open it for editing and then – from the “Insert” options on the left – select “Blog Content.” Next, you enter the URL of your RSS feed. When that is done, Constant Contact gives you a list of recently published blogs; select the ones you want to...
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