I am one of life’s list writers, I write lists for just about everything and I know only too well that most of us don’t take the time to stop, look up from our screens and breathe. And when we are looking at our screens we want quick, shortcuts, bullet-points, not a long ramble… to get the info we need. So please take your time with this, it’s important. Review it, offer feedback, use it, abuse it, copy it, whatever works for you. All I ask is that in those moments when you know you could be more productive, come back to this and review your own actions.
1. Know your best product or service. I mean, which one makes the most money for the business (margin), which one does your business have the most fun delivering or working with? If it is the same one that your clients love, even better. Now identify exactly why, yes dig out the data, analyse the hell out of it and really understand why this product / service works. You’re going to apply some of its traits to your next campaign.
2. Know your best clients. When I say this, I mean get out from behind your screen and go and meet them, find out what makes them tick, what and who they love, where they shop, where they live, what they think of their business and their colleagues, where they go on holiday, where they eat out… build up a profile of each one (beyond their LinkedIn page). You may think the Laird of Candacraig and the Duke of Cornwall have very similar profiles if you relied on minimal information, the fact that one is Billy Connolly and the other is Prince Charles… You need to know your best customers so you can find more, just like them.
3. Your website works really well. Consider there are two audiences, one is your client, the other is the search engines (Google, Ecosia, Bing, Mozilla…). You may be aspirational so look at the big brands and want to emulate them, this could be a bad idea, they don’t necessarily have to tell the story of who they are. You need to make your visitor comfortable in the knowledge that they are in a place that doesn’t annoy them and leads them quickly to the information they expect to see. All to often external links are to a homepage from where they then have to navigate… make sure those external links are to the right pages. On that note, consider backlinks, do you know where yours are coming from? “Free Backlink checker SEO tool” do you know how to create more, in a way that will not persecute your site? If not, find out. (Social Tailor blog posts with a 10 best website list, followed by an analytics dive too… one of each, coming soon.)
4. Write optimised blog posts. Yes, I’m afraid it has to be done, the returns are just too good not to ensure it is done a few times a month. Optimised means a few things, TITLE: Look at Lary Kim’s list of 74 attention grabbing blog titles that work for Inc Consider each post must have an image or set of IMAGES to ensure that when the post is shared, they feature and draw the viewers eye. Have you also included a CTA (a Call-To-Action), no this not an excuse to sell – that’s not what blog posts are for, you are offering value, ensuring visitors, therefore potential clients want to keep coming back for more. Is there a subscribe function, or at the very least a branded “infographic” included that is too good not to share?
5. Great social media. Ok so you know you’ve got to do it, where do you start? Not where you feel most comfortable! You start with your clients and I don’t mean their brand or business, but them as individuals – by all means make a point of following and retweeting / reposting their business Instagram posts; if your client falls asleep while swiping up their Twitter feed, then that’s where you need to be. Each platform deserves specific attention, LinkedIn for example deserves 10 minutes a day, if only to like and comment on the activity of people you are connected to that you would like to do more business with – keeping you in their minds eye. Yes, if that means adopting your CEO’s profile to do it – then get on it (not a practice advocated by LinkedIn it has to be said; however…), in the ideal world you sit them down and get them to do it themselves! Again, there’s loads I can add here, stay tuned for a post on latest tactics for each platform.
6. Film and photography. If you don’t yet know how to edit a short BTS (behind-the-scenes) film of your business activity to show some real humanity, get on it. Or if your business is super protective of its brand and therefore high production values, get in a good production company to deliver it for you (there are loads of freelancers out there who are on call for big firms – we use them a lot). Film is being talked about a lot in agencies all over the world, it grabs attention more quickly than any other creative medium (online). I mention BTS because as you will have gathered by the proliferation of TV programmes where the viewer watches “reality” someone else watching… human’s are inherently nosey, we can’t help ourselves be drawn to look in a neighbours window when the light goes on at night. Showing how you do what you do is often much more interesting than the finished article. Oh, and yes, get really good at photography – stop worrying about expensive kit, your phone is often as good as an SLR – do your research into lighting. Good photography is all about great lighting.
7. Email. In this GDPR world I am hesitant to recommend a tactic that will give you the email address of every “Marketing Director” in Glasgow that has a Linkedin profile and a Gmail email address – however, it is freely available information provided by Google. I should point out that there are 87,400 results… and the vast majority of them have very little to do with Glasgow or marketing… that said, if you enter site:linkedin.com/in “glasgow” “marketing director” “gmail.com” or along the same lines you’ll get results you didn’t expect.
Before you start looking for tools to scrape those emails in order to SPAM people, PLEASE DON’T – you send an email to each one personally saying you found their email on Google and could you offer them some value / benefit… The first conversation you have with someone that does not know you or your brand is not “BUY MY STUFF”, you need to build trust and rapport, you do that by being useful, of value and listening very hard to what they have to say. IMHO every email needs to be value led unless you are an ecommerce business.
I have to say that I for one very infrequently look at email and know many that avoid it and have assistants that vet it – it’s nearly always best to start with a phone call.
8. Events. Get you and your team out to events, even better stand up and offer a “keynote” This is the one place where you can maximise your attendance to connect with your next big opportunity. Make a point of standing out, being memorable; whether that is being in a room of I.T. network professionals when you are an Accountant, or the only person wearing an orange jumper when everyone else is in business attire. Stop heading towards the people you know, reach out your hand, introduce yourself, make a point of listening carefully to each person in the “huddle” and if someone asks you what you do – use a clever metaphor or a brief case study of a problem the business solved.
9. UGC. User Generated Content – get your STAR’s aligned! Use great case studies to explain how you solve problems for clients, use STAR: Situation, Task, Activity, Result with % or £ or chart… whatever is the best way to explain the phenomenal result your client benefitted from. When “borrowing” UGC from social media there are a number of Do’s and Don’ts the link is 2015, still pertinent. When you get client feedback, shorten the best bits and use them as quotes for your social media content or website banners to break up some of your website content.
10. Collaborations and partnerships. I often recount the story of Birdseye chasing Harry Ramsden when the business had one restaurant in West Yorkshire. Birdseye recognised the power of the brand for seriously high quality produce and chased Ramsden’s for years, because they wanted to sell slightly bigger, much more expensive frozen fish. When the deal was done Harry Ramsden could be found in just about every city across the UK. Your small brand, your small business, doing its niche could be exactly what a much bigger business may be looking for. Never tire of knocking on the door of big business, you could be the answer they are looking for.
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