Ideas for Business

A quote from Peter Drucker:

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Where does marketing really begin? As management guru Peter Drucker stated it, “Marketing is the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view.” Put another way, every single interaction the customer has with your business can and should be seen as marketing.

If this is true, and I believe it is, then there is no beginning or end to marketing. Everything you do is marketing. Customer service. Shipping. Selling. Labeling boxes. Dumping the garbage. And …

OK, did I go overboard?

If marketing is your whole business as seen from the customer’s point of view then everything you do has an impact on that. You can’t minimize any aspect of your business without affecting the whole. That should put a new twist on what is important for your business, right?

Instead of thinking of marketing as communicating with your customers, you should also be thinking about it as your customer hiding behind a tree and watching you work, oblivious to their presence. Would you act that way if your customer was present? Would you throw that item in the garbage if your customer was present? Would you put that item on the half-off shelf if your customer know why you were doing it?

It is important to think about these issues because your customers could find out things about your business you don’t want them to know. There is always somebody watching. And it’s important in this day and age to stay competitive, which means beating your competition in every way possible - even at the Watch Me game.

SEO is getting more complicated all the time. I read a blog post just a while ago where the author said splitting up the components of a web design was a regular pattern for him. But he’s working with larger corporations.

The way he does it is he separates the elements on the page. The template is in one file. The CSS is in one file. The html is in one file. The content is in another file. One reason for doing this, he says, is so people who are not developers can write keyword-rich content without knowing or having to learn html. Then the optimization team can do their thing without messing with the content.

Makes sense except that content is the biggest part of optimization. Sure, templates contribute. CSS contributes. HTML contributes. But if you want to get to the top of Google, you can do it with an off-the-shelf template, no CSS, and just plain great content. That’s the advantage of being a small business, I guess. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on a design team that will get all fancy on you. Just keep it simple and focus on the basics and you’ll do fine - with your SEO and your content.

Time management. Just thinking about it makes us sick, doesn’t it? In truth, we need it. It’s necessary. It keeps us on track and makes us more efficient.

Greater business efficiency boils down to just one thing: How you spend your time. It’s the most important thing in business. Making money is good. You always want to make a profit. But if you lose revenue over a bad decision, you can always turn that around and increase your future revenue. You learn. You turn a loss into a gain. But if you lose time then you can’t get that back. That makes a time a bit more valuable than money, doesn’t it?

Small business owners are typically more strapped for time than their big corporation counterparts. Corporate executives usually have access to free training tools that help them become more efficient managers. Small business people, though we face the same challenges, are on our own. We’ve got to pay to play. Many of us feel that we can’t afford to shell out the dollars for the efficiency training, so we go on and on and on spending our time on things that don’t matter and in the process lose out on ROI. It’s one of the reasons many small businesses go down before the five year mark.

One tip I’d like to share for making your business day more efficient and allowing you get more done is this: Limitation. Grasp it.

Yes, I’m talking about limiting your activities. Let me explain:

Many of us, when we hear of the great new tool that everyone is using, rush over to give it a try. Some of us have so many social media accounts that we don’t use that if we started using them all then we’d only spend one day a month at each one, or less. Stop that!

The key to more efficiency is to learn what is truly important to your business and to focus on that. Do you need all those social media accounts? Maybe not. Maybe you just need one or two. Or maybe more, but who’s going to manage them?

There are two ways to increase your efficiency: Hire someone to handle the tasks that are eating up your time, and that costs money - although, it may not be a bad solution for some of you - or to limit the amount of time that you spend doing unnecessary things. In some cases I’d say hire someone and pay them $8-$10 per hour to handle those menial tasks that you shouldn’t be doing. In other cases, and in a lot of cases, I’d say cut out completely some of those things you are trying to do and just focus on the important ones. I’ll bet you get more done.

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We’ve made the case for integrating media relations, SEO and social media into a digital PR program as well as covering some of the basics. Now we can drill a bit deeper into blogger relations and social media monitoring.

The advent of digital PR and the technology tools that serve as compliments means changes in the way agencies provide client consulting and practice management. In the case of TopRank, we’re running both a internet marketing agency and a public relations practice, so we’ve always counseled our clients on the use of targeted keywords during interviews and in communications with the media as well as with content published to the web. In a push and pull PR strategy, keywords are used to optimize content and digital assets to enable the media to pull themselves to a client’s news.

Optimize your media relations training. For media relations coaching with keywords, the phrases to use in interviews (along with the brand message) are the keywords the company news content is optimized for. When the interviews or articles are published on or offline, many readers will remember the topic, but not the names of all the companies mentioned. More often than not, readers will go to go to Google and search the topic of the article whereupon the company has prominent visibility in the search results. The traffic this tactic generates includes both consumers searching for products/services as well as journalists researching stories.

I’m a blog. Can you relate? Another emerging practice area for many digital PR practitioners is Blogger Relations. Pitching in media relations is similar in many ways to individual link building. Pitching bloggers for PR purposes or as part of a link building program can be a slippery slope when approached with traditional tactics. Most bloggers don’t respond well, if at all, to a mass distributed email pitch. For successful blogger relations, more effort must be undertaken into qualifying bloggers to determine their degree of influence, topics that are important to them and their readers. Pitching is customized and personal by default, not as an exception.

Spin cycle to transparency. Most tenured PR professionals grew up in the industry on spin so it takes a bit of re-training to get more experienced media relations staff in the habit of social participation and transparency. Blogger relations is a never ending task of practice and refinement as is link building for search engine optimization. PR is still about persuasion though, so there will always be some aspect of the pitching effort designed for a particular messaging outcome just like there is an intended outcome for a link solicitation with SEO. That’s not “spin” as we know it today, but it is still about influence, a “sale” to be made, a media “hit” to score.

Social crisis management. Another change with the increasing popularity of digital PR is how public relations practitioners handle crisis communications and the rapid spread of information online. In the past, PR professionals could call their contacts within the media to keep a negative story from getting coverage. With more and more editorial decisions in the hands of user generated content, there’s nothing any company or PR professional can do to stop negative news from being posted, ranted, commented and spread amongst blogs, Twitter and instant messaging.

Listen to the brand conversation. Today’s participatory web requires companies to be involved with online communities in order to gain any kind of foothold on what’s being said and discussed about their brands. The notion that, “Conversations are happening with or without you, so get involved or get left behind”, rings true for brands and PR as well as for advertising and marketing.

Brands need to be monitored continuously and when dissention is detected, it must be qualified and responded to quickly before it becomes a full blown crisis. Kryponite locks are a classic example of this and with the Bic pen fiasco still occupying top five search results, they could seriously use some SEO expertise with Search Engine Reputation Management.

It’s about people, technology and keywords. Corporate PR and communications need to allocate ongoing software (social media and brand monitoring) and human resources (Community Manager) to this end in proportion to the value of their brand equity. The bigger the brand, the more you have to lose by not paying attention to what social communities and the blogosphere is saying. Social media monitoring is keyword based, so understanding keyword research from a SEO and branding perspective can be instrumental in an effective listening effort.

As companies should “listen” to the social web for negative sentiment, they should also listen for evangelists. Reaching out to brand proponents and energizing their efforts with recognition and communication tools goes a long way towards building a brand online. It’s also the foundation for building community.

Is it really about “Adapt or die”? When it comes to digital PR and the integration of online PR, social media and search engine optimization, it’s a critical moment for PR agencies and corporate PR departments: embrace the social web or it will embrace you. New methods of online communication and influence require new tools and skill sets on the part of online marketing and PR practitioners. Listening, participating and engaging with less direct message control mean agencies must adjust their organizations in order to adapt. It also requires new models for managing client expectations.

Whether it’s optimizing news content for SEO, digital asset optimization for media and news assets or an integrated Push/Pull PR strategy involving both optimization and media/blogger outreach, new corporate “neural pathways” must be laid in order for companies to realize their place in the social web.

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Dr. Ralph Wilson is one of the pioneers in Internet marketing. Here’s a video he recently made with Jim Sterne and Bryan Eisenberg on continuous improvement for small businesses. This is a great video for any small business owner, but there are two things I’d like to point out about it. First, the video:

• First bullet point: He’s using YouTube as a marketing tool. Here, Dr. Wilson demonstrates how YouTube can be used to market your business with a professional quality video that targets your niche customer. You can do that too!
• Second bullet point: Dr. Wilson, Sterne, and Eisenberg all point out that continuous improvement for small businesses boils down to one thing - do the most important thing first. The bottom line is, you are growing your web business for your site visitors. What can you do to make it better for them? That’s what you should be doing.

In order for continuous improvement to work, you’ve got to set aside some time to evaluate and analyze your business. Time alone. It can be 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour, but you’ve got to put it on your schedule. I like what Jim Sterne said about making a list of the things you did in the last two things and pay someone $10 per hour to do those things that are taking up your time and that anyone can do. Pay them minimum wage, whatever. But clean your plate for the really important things.

Watch more small business marketing videos.