Discover how U.S. ‘belts’ can simplify, inspire your marketing, product development
Need something to “prime the pump” and get you started thinking about new markets to develop, new customers that might be interested in your product or service, or new ways to adapt or market your product or service? Maybe you need a good belt! No, I’m not talking about taking a swig of your favorite craft whisky or other adult beverage, I’m talking about all the “belts” that our nation “wears.” You probably know about the Bible Belt and Rust Belt, but have you considered the attributes of the people who live there? Do your products, services, or marketing materials resonate with them? While these terms are very familiar with most Americans, many of us haven’t given a lot of thought to discovering ways to better penetrate those markets. However, those are just two of the most well-known U.S. belts. I’m going to list some more. Look over this list with an eye toward finding a few that might represent as-yet-untapped sales and marketing opportunities for you. The Black Belt. This is an area in the South and Southeast with a concentration of African-Americans. Many have roots in the area that reach back to the days of slavery. Rather than migrating north, these families remained in the south. That will give them different likes, dislikes, needs, and desires than African-Americans in northern cities and suburbs. The Frost Belt. Despite global warming warnings, the Northeast and North Central parts of the nation are going to be experiencing those deep freeze winters well into the future. Let’s contrast this with The Sun Belt, which stretches across the southern states of our nation from coast to coast. Do you have marketing materials or ads created that specifically target buyers in these two very different climate zones? The Jell-O Belt. These are the western states – especially Utah and the surrounding states – with a large Mormon population. The values and lifestyles of individuals there will differ from other areas of the country. The Stroke Belt. We’re back in the Southeast here, and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that southern cooking plays a role in the name of this belt. In any case, this area leads the U.S. population in strokes and various cardiovascular diseases. If your product or service is health related, you should probably be here. The Unchurched Belt. I mentioned the Bible Belt above, here’s the other side of that coin. Specifically, it refers to the Northeast where church attendance is typically lower than other areas of the nation. Again, that will shape attitudes and how buyers react to your offerings. When marketing professionals tackle selling in the United States, they are presented with an extremely diverse population. Considering the different “belts” present here is one way to bring some order to that diversity and perhaps simplify some business...
read moreJust stop it!
By Shep Hyken There’s an old joke that goes something like this: A guy goes to the doctor. He raises his arm and complains, “It hurts when I do this.” The doc says, “Then don’t do that.” In other words, “Stop it!” That reminds me of a very funny video I saw on YouTube that features comedian Bob Newhart. It’s called “Stop It!”. In the video, Bob Newhart is a therapist and his patient is complaining about a problem she is having. She has a fear of being buried alive in a box. Remember, this is a comedy sketch. His solution is to tell her, “Stop it!” Customer service is the same way. In some of the workshops we present on service, there is an exercise where we ask the audience members to come up with the most common complaints they hear from customers. We also ask them how often these complaints occur. Sometimes I’m amazed when the response is every day – even multiple times throughout the day. That’s when I share the solution. I look at the audience and state, “I have a solution to this problem. Are you ready?” I then pause for dramatic effect and say, “Stop it!” That gets a laugh from the audience. They know it’s a joke. If it were that simple, they would have already stopped doing whatever was causing the problem. But, it’s a great set up for the conversation on how to eliminate or at least mitigate this problem that causes customers to complain so often. How many times do we upset a customer with the same processes, policies or rules? If you are hearing the same complaint again and again, realize that there are many other customers who have the same complaint, but just aren’t sharing it with you. The statistic most commonly shared is that in an average business, for every complaint you hear from a customer, there are 26 others that have the same complaint, but choose not to tell you. Even if that stat is half true, that’s still a lot of unhappy customers. You think they are happy because they don’t complain to you. But, they aren’t happy. They may or may not come back. Can you afford to take that chance? So, have a discussion with your team. If there’s a problem that’s happening repeatedly, and you’re hearing customers frequently complain about it, find out what’s driving that complaint. There has to be a way to make it better. Because something bad that happens over and over again, shouldn’t happen over and over again. So…stop it! • • • Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, keynote speaker and New York Times bestselling business author. For information contact or www.hyken.com. For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs go to www.thecustomerfocus.com. Follow Shep on Twitter: @Hyken (Copyright © MMXVII, Shep...
read moreMy SEO secret: Evergreen lists
A blog is the utility player in a successful website. Here are just a few of the major roles a good blog plays: It boosts search engine optimization. It builds relationships with customers and prospects. It pairs nicely with your social media marketing program. It establishes your authority. Those are some of the benefits of a successful blog; now let’s look at two points that help make a successful blog post: List posts are always popular. Evergreen content gives any post a significantly longer lifespan. Whenever you can combine two proven winners into one post, you have the potential to create a monstrously successful blog post. Usually when we discuss the creation of list posts we don’t talk about them as evergreen content. But when done right, they can be extremely powerful additions to your website. By far, the single most popular post on my website is The 50 (plus) Best 2017 Small Business, Tech, Marketing Conferences: Attend and Grab Your Competitive Edge! I first published this post two years ago and it listed the best 2015 conferences. The list includes locations, dates, and links to the various conference websites. Several times each year, I review the conferences, looking for dates and locations for the following year. As I find these I update the list. Occasionally, a new conference comes to my attention and I add it to the list. I update the existing blog rather than create a new post; it’s an easy way to keep all the search engine authority the original post has built up over the years. It takes a significant amount of time for a post to start generating strong, consistent traffic, so you need to see this as a long-term play. Can you think of some “updateable” lists you can post that will be popular with your audience? Spend some time brainstorming ideas and then start knocking them off; the more you create, the more likely you are to hit a homerun. You might also publish some lists that complement your core subject area but are still of interest to the people you want to reach. It’s important that you keep these lists updated; that’s the only way that search engines will begin to see them as authoritative. Let me finish this by telling you about another major bonus of evergreen and updated list posts – not one do they produce traffic, they are easy to create and maintain. You’ll develop a routine for updating your lists and find that you can keep them current with just a few minutes of work every couple of months. Powerful and easy – that’s a combination you can’t...
read moreHow to tweak people for fun and profit
Do you know what’s really popular? Unpopular opinions. There was a trending hashtag on Twitter the other day that reminded me of one of the best strategies to improve readership on your blog. The hashtag was #confessyourunpopularopinions. Saying something that goes against conventional wisdom or is contrary to the majority of public opinion always attracts attention. The trick is to take a position that sparks interest, gets people thinking, but doesn’t totally alienate half of your customers and prospects. Frankly, I’m often surprised how conventional wisdom can shift 180 degrees over time…and sometimes these u-turns happen fairly quickly. The diet advice we get falls into this category. A food we should avoid at all costs one year can become beneficial to our health the next. For our purposes, the point of taking positions that are currently out of favor is to make people think. They give you and your reader an opportunity to look at things from a fresh point of view. Further, these kinds of blogs can also generate more reader engagement and reaction than the average blog post. Want more blog comments? Be outrageous. To get started, make a list of the sacred cows in your industry or commercial sector: Are you in real estate? Make the argument that a price correction would be good in the long run. Do you sell appliances? Make the case that people should start washing their clothes by hand. Are you a restaurant owner? Tell fathers, sons, and daughters to make their mom a home-cooked meal next Mother’s Day instead of taking her out. I’ve tried to pick some points of view that I think are a bit outlandish just to give you the idea. You see, the goal here is to differentiate yourself from all the other voices out there. You could probably list 10 to 20 standard blog topics people write about all the time in your industry. Who needs another one of those? Finally, if you’re a good blogger, you can entertain folks with some wild ideas and then turn things around as you’re closing your article and make an even stronger case for the “conventional wisdom.” Or you could stick to your...
read moreThis week in small business: Easy, simple, and smart advice for success
Some wise folks were busy posting useful advice over the last week or so. I think you and your business plans will benefit from the easy, simple, and wise guidance in this collection of curated content. Leadership, management, and productivity I prefer easy over difficult, so I appreciated Gabriel Nathan’s article, The Easiest Ways To Enhance Productivity And Efficiency At Work. I also prefer simple over complicated, so I also appreciated Mike Michalowicz’ article, Simple Strategies for Accomplishing More in Less Time. Shhhh! Kevin Kruse suggests that the secret to your success might be quiet time in this interview with Justin Talbot-Zorn and Leigh Marz! Some say that nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. I disagree and point to this stylistic stroll down web design memory lane by Sean Hervo. Of all the investments you make over the course of your life, investing in yourself should be #1. Nicholas Cole offers good advice on how to spend your free time. Writing for the Marketing Insider Group, Jacob Warick gives us five ways that companies are screwing up their e-commerce growth. Judi Wineland and her two daughters share nine business lessons “from the wild” that they have learned in their far-flung travels in this Forbes article by Laura Begley Bloom. With 30 years of entrepreneurship under his belt, Mike Kappel describes what kind of small business employees you need to grow your company. Marketing and sales Writer’s block and content marketer’s block are closely related. If you ever suffer a “block,” you’ll find help in Bryan Blackburn’s 6 Brainstorm Resources for Content Marketers. When you use visuals to tell stories, you have a better chance at web success. Check out the 10 best tools for visual storytelling outlined in this piece by Kylie Ora Lobell. Don’t miss this introduction to ranking your local business on Google by David Mihm on the Yoast blog. Dave Mendoca shares podcasting success tips from three top women entrepreneur hosts. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Need a good ecommerce idea? Check out this list of trending business ideas at Shopify. Successful craft brewer Sam Calagione scaled back his hit beer! Cheers?! Get the backstory in this article by Jason Feifer. Are you strong enough to swim against the current? If so, check out what Ross Tsakas has to say about how entrepreneurs can successfully challenge convention. Politics, government, and the economy Scott Lanman does a great job boiling down what the four-month high in consumer confidence means to the economy. Think about it: Are sales tax holidays really a good thing? Kelly Phillips Erb has the guts to honestly address that...
read moreBig banks approving more small business loans
While alternative lenders – like the web-based peer-to-peer enterprises – have been getting a lot of attention in the media, it’s the large banks that are really making small business lending “news” right now. Big bank loan approval rates to small businesses hit an all-time high in the June 2017 Biz2credit Small Business Lending Index. It jumped 0.2 percent over May, bringing it to 24.3 percent. This makes the eighth time over the last year that big bank loan approval rates have increased. By contrast, June loan approval rates at alternative lenders dropped by the same amount, 0.2 percent. Further they are more than 2 percent below where they were during June 2016. Rohit Arora, Biz2Credit CEO, explained the situation saying, “Approval percentages at big banks and institutional investors are at post-recession highs. The result is that alternative lenders get requests from less creditworthy borrowers. These are riskier deals.” Further, the recent Fed policy of gradually increasing interest rates is making it more attractive for big banks to lend. “For the third consecutive quarter, the Federal Reserve has voted to increase its benchmark interest rate to a range between 1 percent and 1.25 percent in a vote of confidence in the economy. This bodes well for big banks,” Arora said. “The interest rate increases are resulting in more profitable deals for big banks. This is incentivizing these mainstream lending institutions to approve a higher percentage of loan requests,” he added. Credit union loan approval rates inched lower 0.1 percent to 40.4 percent, a rate that’s down a little over 1 percent from the same time in 2016. However, according to Arora, interest rates aren’t dampening approvals at credit unions – it’s the pace and style of business today that’s leaving them in the dust. “In the FinTech era, credit unions have fallen behind because other categories of lenders have embraced technology. In the process, they lowered their risk, while many credit unions have remained somewhat old fashioned,” he said. “Credit unions typically process loan requests at a slower rate, and in today’s fast-paced economy, borrowers simply aren’t willing to wait. Credit unions are becoming less relevant in small business lending,” Arora explained. You can check out the full report on the Biz2credit website. ...
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