Small Business Marketing Lessons Taken from The Kickstarter World
Important small business marketing thoughts occurred to me recently when I was listening to an interview with Zach Smith, the founder of Funded.today, a company that has proved very successful at helping projects get funded on Kickstarter. We’ve all been getting schooled in crowdfunding in recent years. It’s a new way to get a company up and running or a product into the marketplace. Although Zach didn’t say this explicitly, I believe that there are strong parallels between marketing a Kickstarter campaign and marketing virtually any product or service, including marketing your small business. Kickstarter distinctives People have been missing this point because they don’t put the Kickstarter in the correct perspective. The key is not to confuse supporting a Kickstarter project with other crowdfunding systems where funders become stock holders. In other words, people who step up to give to a Kickstarter campaign aren’t examining the health and strength of the company as much as they are drawn to the product the company wants to produce. Back in the formative years of the Internet, we talked a lot about “early adopters” – those brave individuals who would jump in and try a new technology before it became mainstream. I think we could label Kickstarter donor enthusiasts as “even-earlier-adopters.” They are, after all, usually getting in line to adopt something that hasn’t even seen the light of day yet. I say this because it seems that most people who back a Kickstarter campaign pony up their money to get one of the first products to roll off the assembly line. They are betting that the product will actually get made and are willing to pay a premium to be one of the first customers. Interesting side note: Zach said that the most lucrative group to market a new Kickstarter project to are individuals who have already backed one or more Kickstarter projects. This tells us that they are folks who get excited by the smell of new technology or a path-breaking product in general – they aren’t necessarily devoted to one product family. Small Business marketing à la Kickstarter Central to successfully marketing a Kickstarter project are three attributes, Zach explained, and I think virtually every small business owner should keep these in mind when planning a marketing or advertising campaign. These are absolutely fundamental for successful selling: Scarcity, Urgency, and Social proof. Kickstarter has some of these built into its system. Usually, people launching campaigns put limits on the various funding levels; this provides immediate scarcity. They don’t want to get inundated with orders they can’t fulfill. All Kickstarter campaigns “expire” on a specific date and if companies don’t make their fundraising goal, they get no money. Kickstarter provides social proof via its “New and Noteworthy” feature, “Project we Love” endorsement, “returning backers” statistics, social shares, and supporter comments. Whenever you launch an advertising or marketing campaign, if you have those three elements – scarcity, urgency, and social proof – baked into its DNA, you have an excellent chance at success. If you drop the ball on one, your odds go way down. Use your words There is a range of “tools” you can use to communicate these three attributes. The language you use and how you structure your campaigns are important. Phrases like “ends Friday,” “first 100...
read moreHow To Do Free Surveys to Take the Pulse of Customers, Employees
“If you don’t ask, you don’t get.” – Stevie Wonder I’d like to tweak that just a little bit and say, “If you don’t ask, you’ll never know,” and that gets at the heart of many problems small business owners have: lack of information. The more you know about your customers, the better you’re able to meet their needs. Getting all the granular details about consumers is why there are so many free smartphone game apps. They are collecting details about their users all the time and sending the information off to marketers. Of course, few app users realize how much data is being collected about them when they’re tossing angry fowl across their smartphone screens. Google free survey forms But I want you to consider getting additional insights into your customers and prospects the old-fashioned way: by asking them. And to accomplish this, I’d like to introduce you to Google Forms, a free service that is part of Google Docs. You can create a Google form to survey a group of people, or to handle various other functions, such as RSVPing or signing up for an event. In fact, Google has some templates available for several of these standard functions. However, I want to give you enough information to get you started creating your own survey. You could use a survey in a variety of ways. You could: Ask about what kind of features your customers would like to see in future products or services, Inquire about the best hours and days for your business to be open, or Have people vote on what your new store cat mascot should be named. These are just a few random ideas. Frankly, while you can get some very valuable information through surveys, one of their most important attributes is that they get your customers and clients engaged with your brand. If they aren’t too time consuming, people generally like to offer their opinions and they value a business that takes the time to ask them about what they think. Using Google survey forms Getting started is easy. You need an account with Google, but once you have that, you’ll see that on the Google Forms page you can select a template or start out with a blank form. At that point you can start adding questions using the drop-down menu. Note that you can also make responding to any question required. If you do that, then respondents won’t be able to move beyond the required question until they offer a response. There are many types of questions and kinds of responses you can collect using a Google Form. However, one type of response doesn’t seem to be supported yet. I’m talking about the kind of questions that branch out. For example, You might ask, “Did you have the apple pie when you dined at our restaurant?” A “yes” answer would take the person to a series of follow-up questions while a “no” answer would lead elsewhere within the survey. But, with that feature not available, there are still a lot of useful ways to ask questions. With a linear scale question, you ask users to rate a product or service on a given scale. Google forms give you a default one to five scale, but you can adjust the span of...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: 5 tasty marketing lessons from a vegan meat company!
I don’t know what this means, but you’ll find two oxymorons (friendly fraud and vegan meat) among this week’s collection of curated content. On top of that, there is great leadership, marketing, and startup advice. Marketing and sales Believe it or not, you can learn some marketing lessons – five to be exact – from a vegan meat company. (Hey, there’s the first oxymoron!) You invest a lot of time in marketing, but if you’re making these five marketing mistakes, they could be costing you, big time. If you’re on Facebook, you need to understand how its news feed works to have any chance at reaching your market. And speaking of Facebook, here are 11 little-known features for marketers. Make sure you’re using #hashtags the right way on Twitter! Need to get the big picture on influencer marketing? You’ll find it in this article by Misha Talavera. And for the big picture on marketing automation, you’ll want to look over this article. Leadership, management, and productivity “Friendly Fraud” is today’s second oxymoron, and it’s an oxymoron that’s costing merchants more than $11 billion a year. Learn the signs of friendly fraud. Shep Hyken brings together the worlds of improv and customer service in this article. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is break off your relationship with a customer. Here’s when to make the move. Learn how to manage your online reputation by wielding 15 SEO tools. Here are 25 productivity tips that will teach you to steal time like a successful entrepreneur. Speaking of time, you and your team must have enough of it available for Jeanne Bliss’ 17-second customer experience strategy. Need to monetize your WordPress website? Here are nine ways to do it. Roy Osing does a good job encapsulating the leadership lessons he learned throughout his three-decade career. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation You may know the seven deadly sins that cover your personal life (gluttony, etc.), but do you know the seven deadly startup sins? You want your startup to get off to a strong start, right? If so, check out this podcast on customer service lessons for startups. Politics, government, and the economy Global shockwaves abound after the United Kingdom’s recent referendum to leave the European Union. But where does that put small businesses in the U.S.? Not good news: 71% of Americans think the economy is...
read moreThere is only one first place finisher in the customer service race: How to make it you
When it comes to anything involving speed and measuring who is the fastest, nobody remembers who took second place. For example, Jesse Owens’ win in the 200-meter dash at the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin will always be remembered. We’re still making movies about it. But who remembers Matthew Robinson who took second place and also broke the old Olympic record on his way to winning the silver medal? (By the way, although Matthew Robinson was quite an accomplished athlete, he was first overshadowed by Owens and later overshadowed by his younger brother, a hall-of-fame ballplayer whose first name was Jackie and wore the number 42. Hey, they’re still making movies about him too!) I mention these examples of speed from the athletic world because I think the principle they illustrate carries over into customer service: If you’re second fastest, you stand a good chance of being forgotten. Small business owner does customer service I was listening to a small business owner talk about her startup the other day. She was relating a story about how she was once on her laptop during a Sunday evening at home and answering customer service questions. One of the customers told her how startled she was to get a response on a Sunday night. This small business owner understands how important it is to get virtually immediate responses to customer service inquiries because that is the level of service she has come to expect. She says she is a member of the “Now Now Club.” I think many of us have joined that club; we want our questions answered now and our problems solved now. So many Internet-based companies are doing such an incredible job at immediately responding to and taking care of their customers that membership in the Now Now Club has become the norm. What you need to understand about this is that it’s a sword that cuts two ways. First, if you please members of the Now Now Club, you can hold on to your customers for the long term. Providing incredible customer service along with a wonderful customer experience are perhaps your two biggest weapons in your marketing campaign. They engender loyalty and frankly, people will pay a premium for them. You can be the “high price leader” if you significantly outshine your competitors with your customer service. Few second chances in customer service However, the other edge of that sword is that customers won’t give you very many chances to get it right. With vendors so easily accessible via the Internet, jumping your ship to sample the ride on your competitor’s boat takes no more effort than a few mouse clicks. Further, when customers engage your customer service system, they will always be measuring it against all the other customer service experiences they have had. They’ll be drawing up a little mental report card and giving you scores on topics such as: Were you faster or slower than customer service at other businesses they regularly frequent? Were your employees friendly? Did your employees have the knowledge, ability, and authority to solve their problems? Did the problem get solved on the first contact with customer service? So think about how you want your business to be known. Do you want it to be a Jesse Owens or...
read moreBe afraid. Be very afraid: The perils of a poor web presence
Climb into your time machine for a moment and set it for 1965. Ready? Push the big red button. Okay, you’re in 1965. Walk into the first small business you see and ask if they have a phone. Go into the next small business and ask the same question. Once you’re convinced that every small business has a telephone, get back in your time machine and set it for today. The point I want to make is that not having a small business website today would be the equivalent of not having a telephone any time after telephones became routinely available. Yet we know that a large percentage of small businesses do not have websites and this was reflected in a recent Surepayroll Small Business Scorecard survey. When they questioned small businesses about websites, 42 percent said that the Internet wasn’t very important to their business. I think this is a comment more on their willingness to develop a web presence than anything else. Uses for a small business website Let’s go back to the comparison that started this article and ask a question: Why would a business want a phone back in 1965? I don’t think very many businesses would make sales directly over the phone, especially B2C small businesses. However, customers and clients relied heavily on the telephone communications to: Get information about products, Comparison shop, Find businesses in directories, Check on orders and product availability, Establish the business’ credibility, Learn business hours, and more. Here’s the most important thing I want you to take away from this article: No matter what kind of business you’re in today, your customers go to the Internet to do the things I’ve just listed above. Failing to have a website would be a mistake as big as failing to have a phone in pre-Internet days. Further, failing to maintain your website would be a mistake as big as failing to answer the phone in pre-Internet days. Small business website adds value Let me touch on a secondary problem you will have if you don’t have a good, robust, modern, and well-maintained website: The value of your business will not be there when you decide to sell. Imagine a prospective buyer looking at your business. The first thing this person will do is scour the Internet for everything about your company. If you don’t have a website, that’s immediately a deal breaker. Also, if you don’t have a website, then you won’t have search engine placement, which will drive a stake through the heart of your ability to sell your business. Additionally, if you don’t have an active web presence, you won’t have a good email list. How much more valuable do you think your business will be if you’re able to include in the sale a lengthy email address list of active customers? If you don’t have that, how much do you think it will bring down the value of your business? Your ability for successful social media marketing can be evaluated in the same way. So far much of what we’ve discussed here is centered around the topic of using your web presence as part of customer service and marketing, but let’s not overlook the importance of e-commerce. In the Surepayroll survey, 74 percent of small business owners said...
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