The lesson of the 1-legged seagull
It’s easier to reach people today than ever before in history. However, that is both a blessing and a curse. Why? Because if it’s easier for you to reach people, it’s also easier for everyone on the planet to reach people. This leads to email overload, sensory overload, Internet addiction, tech burnout, and all kinds of modern day problems. For the business owner, the problem narrows down to the question of how to get noticed. Have you ever been on an ocean beach where hundreds of seagulls were scurrying up and down the edge of the water doing that “Mine! Mine! Mine!” seagull scream? If not at the shore, I’m sure you’ve experienced something similar in an open field or school yard. I remember one day like that, but as I scanned the flock of gulls – more like a herd, actually – one caught my eye. It was hopping around and keeping up with all the other gulls despite the fact that it only had one leg. I had to look two or three times to make sure I was seeing it right. I thought maybe it merely had one leg tucked into its belly or something. But no, this gull was getting by with just one spindly little seagull leg. Once I noticed it, I couldn’t take my eyes off the one-legged gull. You need to learn a lesson from that bird and apply it to your online marketing. That gull captured my attention and held it for two very basic reasons: It was different from all the rest, and It had an emotionally appealing story to tell. The other hundred seagulls “reached” me, but the one-legged gull was the only bird that “touched” me. First, note that it didn’t take a lot to catch my eye. After all, seagull legs are pretty tiny. I think this gull’s hopping motion is what I noticed, and even that wasn’t too different from how two-legged gulls get around on the sand. Here’s the point: Our senses are quite good. We are visually screening our environment virtually every waking hour and we notice little things. You don’t have to be radically different visually to stand out from the crowd. You just need to have that one noticeable difference. I’ve discussed this many times in regards to your product or service, but the same principle applies to your marketing materials. Second, once you catch your prospects’ eye, you need to grab their heart. I’m using the word “heart” here in a very general way. Your appeal doesn’t need to bring tears to your prospect’s eyes; it just needs to connect on some emotional level. The promise or proof of superior quality might grab the hearts of people who have been suffering through less than stellar quality, for example. These points are important to remember when you’re developing marketing campaigns. We all want our marketing campaigns to return hundreds of qualified prospects. You can do this by spending a lot of money on ad buys – or you can differentiate your materials and design them in ways that push the right emotional buttons and get just as many prospects with smaller ad buys. The question you need to ask yourself is this: Are you “touching” people or merely “reaching”...
read moreBye-bye Boomers! Adios Gen Xers! Millennials in management: Are you ready?
As we look toward the coming year, I think it’s a good time to take a “long view” of how we are assimilating Millennials into our companies. The position of Millennials in the workforce is a topic often covered in business blogs like mine, and that’s a good thing because it’s an important issue. Exactly how important it is jumped out at me the other day when Paychex published the company’s latest special report – The Rise of the Millennial Employee. The first item in the report is the graph below, which shows the trends of Millennials, Gen Xers, and Baby Boomers as percentages of the small business workforce between 2011 and 2017. The exit of Gen Xers and Baby Boomers is rather dramatic! The Millennial overview The report also provides interesting statistics on which areas of the country employ Millennials more and less, along with some earning comparisons between Millennials and the working population as a whole. However, I don’t think there’s too many unexpected findings here. Generally, Millennials are making less than the national average in earnings, but that is almost certainly due to the fact that they are in the earlier years of their careers. That, I believe, is also reflected in the fact that the Paychex study found that wages are increasing faster for Millennials than for the overall work force. The Millennial challenge I like the advice Paychex gives small business owners for dealing with the growing Millennial workforce. They divide it up into three important areas: Attracting Millennial Talent, Engaging Millennial Talent, and Growing Millennial Talent. Smart small business owners will put objectives, plans, and systems in place that address each of these areas. I’ve previously discussed attracting and engaging Millennials for your small business team, but I think it’s time we also started to get very serious about growing the Millennial talent we have – or will soon have – working with us. This is made abundantly clear by the above graph: Current leaders from the Baby Boomer and Generation X groups are on their way out of the workforce. We need to help Millennials prepare for taking over the helm. And frankly, the businesses that do this best will be the businesses that flourish in the coming decades. Paychex offers some sound advice in this area. Millennials in management You need to provide the opportunities for professional development, including additional training outside of your workplace. I need to add an important observation to this. Millennials are strapped with far more college debt than were graduates from previous generations. In fact, just yesterday I heard about a bright Millennial recent graduate who is looking to hire on with a company that will help her pay for her master’s degree. See what you can do to help your talented and promising Millennial employees. Another point Paychex makes is that if you’re able to find ways to take advantage of Millennials’ passions by using them within your business, it builds their confidence and helps them fit better within your organization. Finally, keep the conversation going. When Millennials come on board, discuss career goals, put a plan in place, and monitor it together so they can feel like they’re making...
read moreA sure-fire 3-step email inbox weight loss program
The first days of a new year are always a time to recommit ourselves to establishing beneficial habits and jettisoning things, circumstances, and relationships that are holding us back. But if the truth be told, we know that many of these efforts – in the long run – end up in failure, so I wanted to suggest one simple way to “clear the decks” that is virtually guaranteed to succeed and provide you with a good productivity payoff throughout the year: Unsubscribe like there’s no tomorrow! If you’re like most of us, throughout the year you subscribe to a wide range of emails that you end up not looking at. We sign up to get a free download, enter a contest, or perhaps simply by accident. One reason we don’t unsubscribe is because the “unsubscribe” link is always very small and buried at the bottom of the email. Because of that we often end up deleting them day after day, or week after week. It doesn’t seem like a big deal on any given day, but over time, the wasted time and mental effort adds up. Beyond that, a clutter-free email inbox, like a clutter-free home or work environment, is far more conducive to clear thinking and enhanced productivity. With that in mind, let me quickly show you three easy things many of you can do. First, for any email account that is based in Google’s Gmail, there is a little “unsubscribe” link at the top of each individual email – you don’t have to go on a hunting expedition through the tiny type at the bottom of the email. Just click the link! Next, I suggest you try using Unroll.me. It’s an app that will collect all of the emails you subscribe to and put them into one daily email digest. That’s great because it reduces the clutter in your inbox. But Unroll.me has another feature: Whenever it finds a new subscription, it alerts you and gives you the option to immediately unsubscribe from it. Finally, I suggest you take advantage of the filtering and anti-spam powers built into whatever email system or software you use. You can often filter out email that comes from a specific domain as well as filter for specific words in the subject line. If you’ve had the same email address for many years, there’s a good chance you’re getting enough daily spam to really bog down your efforts to sort through your inbox. If you use the simple user-friendly tools I’ve described here, you can regain a good deal of your email...
read moreSmall biz optimism reaches record yearly high
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) Small Business Optimism Index average for 2017 posted an all-time record high. That’s the headline from the NFIB survey results released today. “2017 was the most remarkable year in the 45-year history of the NFIB Optimism Index,” said NFIB President and CEO Juanita Duggan. “With a massive tax cut this year, accompanied by significant regulatory relief, we expect very strong growth, millions more jobs, and higher pay for Americans.” “We’ve been doing this research for nearly half a century, longer than anyone else, and I’ve never seen anything like 2017,” added NFIB Chief Economist Bill Dunkelberg. According to the group, the record-high optimism was driven by expectations of better economic policies coming out of Washington, including decreased regulations and tax cuts – both of which have been realized during the first year of the Trump administration. “The lesson of 2017 is that better policies make for better economic results,” said Duggan. “The evidence is overwhelming that small business owners pay close attention to Washington, and that federal policies affect their decisions on whether to hire, whether to invest, whether to grow inventory, and whether to seek capital.” You can find the full December report here....
read moreFully automated small biz marketing now available for $99/month
How does a $99 per month marketing campaign that doesn’t require any more work from you sound? If you reach prospects and customers through Twitter, an automated $99/month marketing program is now available to you. It’s called Twitter Promote Mode and here are some basic details: It’s recommended (read: most effective) for Twitter accounts with up to 2,000 followers, You can expect to reach as many as 30,000 additional people and add 30 followers each month, Twitter Promote Mode Tweets carry the “sponsored” badge, Twitter Promote Mode will boost up to 10 of your first Tweets each day, and You can target up to five interest or metro locations – one or the other, they can’t be combined. I think this program holds a lot of potential for small businesses. Targeting their community could serve a local business very well. And, even businesses that aren’t local, could work their way through various metro centers over time, gaining valuable brand exposure. Below are the interest groups presented to me when I experimented with the signup process. They are somewhat limited, or broad in their coverage. However, most small businesses will be able to find between one and five that serve them well. Promote Mode is designed to be a “mobile first” service, meaning that your Promote Mode dashboard is built into the Twitter mobile app. You’ll be able to easily access your monthly stats from your mobile device. Despite the fact that Twitter hasn’t achieved the kind of growth or profitability that investors are looking for, it remains one of the best vehicles for branding. Couple that with a $99 marketing budget and toss in automation, and Twitter Promote Mode should prove to be a winner for many small...
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