We need to start using some new improved superlatives in our marketing copy. “Great!” you say. Yes, that’s the one. Great really grates on me. Great is so overused that it may as well be blank space. Great carries all the impact of a cotton puff.

Now, there was a time when great really meant something. Take Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia, conqueror of lands, founder of cities for example. Now, he is great. Somehow I just can’t see Product XX’s great online resources changing the political and demographic history of three continents.

Or maybe Ramesses II, Egyptian pharaoh of the Nineteenth dynasty, known as the Great. Can you imagine the great new flavor of Processed Food XXX ruling unchallenged for 66 years, causing the building of cities and monumental sculptures that survive for 3,500 years? Or inspiring poetry such as P.B. Shelley’s Ozymandias “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”?

OK. Actually, I CAN look on Processed Food XXX and despair. But Processed Food XXX great?!?! Not a chance.

The Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s east coast is truly Great. The reef system is thousands of kilometers long, and hosts a diversity of corals and sea life unmatched on the globe. Somehow it just seems insulting to compare it to the great customer (dis)service system of Company XXXX.

So let’s stop claiming every new and old product or service is great. After all, when every thing is great, nothing is great.

There are plenty of under-utilized superlatives available. Pick up a thesaurus or a dictionary and take a look. Click over to Thesaurus.reference.com, Merriam-Webster.com’s Thesaurus or any of the other online thesauri and peruse some of the

august, capital, chief, commanding, dignified, distinguished, eminent, exalted, excellent, famed, famous, fine, glorious, grand, heroic, high-minded, highly regarded, honorable, idealistic, illustrious, impressive, leading, lofty, magnanimous, main, major, noble, notable, noted, noteworthy, outstanding, paramount, primary, principal, prominent, puissant, regal, remarkable, renowned, royal, stately, sublime, superior, superlative, talented, able, absolute, aces, adept, admirable, adroit, awesome, bad*, best, brutal, cold*, complete, consummate, crack*, downright, dynamite, egregious, exceptional, expert, fab, fantastic, fine, first-class*, first-rate, good, heavy*, hellacious, marvelous, masterly, number one, out of sight, out of this world, out-and-out, perfect, positive, proficient, super-duper, surpassing, terrific, total, tough, transcendent, tremendous, unmitigated, unqualified, utter, wonderful, abundant, ample, big, big league, bulky, bull, colossal, considerable, decided, enormous, excessive, extended, extensive, extravagant, extreme, fat, gigantic, grievous, high, huge, humongous, husky, immense, inordinate, jumbo, lengthy, long, major league, mammoth, mondo, numerous, oversize, prodigious, prolonged, pronounced, protracted, strong, stupendous, terrible, titanic, towering, tremendous, vast, voluminous,

alternatives to great. It is time to spice up and enliven our marketing language.

Steve Lange
Palo Alto Software

Tags: adjectives, advertising, creative marketing, descriptors, great, marketing copy, news, spelling, super, superlatives, tips
Posted on September 3rd, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Palo Alto Software is proud to welcome Erin Jacobs of VerticalResponse as a contributing author. As Director of Marketing at VerticalResponse since 2007, Erin is responsible for evangelizing the benefits of email marketing to emerging companies. With over 14 years experience managing global marketing campaigns for technology companies large and small, Erin now shares her Lead Generation and Email Marketing insights with the small business community, helping them increase sales and promote their business online as cost-effectively as possible.

The challenging economy has encouraged many small businesses to test out email marketing in 2009. It’s simple, affordable and trackable after all. Maybe you started out with a “thank you for your business” message or you enticed customers with offers for repeat business and referrals. But the idea of creating a consistent e-newsletter to issue on a monthly basis seems daunting.

Well fear not, you can put a surprisingly compelling newsletter together with a small amount of information. In a recent Extreme Email Makeover session that VerticalResponse hosted, we found that many customers are putting too many offers together in a single email and calling them newsletters. The result, nothing stands out, it isn’t clear to the customer what action they should take, and over time recipients stop opening the emails. A great e-newsletter can be created with very basic information that is readily available. The key is a balance of information and offers (remember the “what’s in it for me” factor). Start by testing a newsletter format with 3 content sections and then increase to 5 over a series of a few months. Let your audience decide the right about of content with open and click through rates.

Easy E-newsletter Content Topics:
1) A Message from the Expert- A short paragraph from you to your audience or an introduction that drives recipients to your blog for a feature length article. Consider offering 5 Ways to Improve X in 2009. Include the first 2 lines of copy in your newsletter as a teaser and link to the full story on your blog for the full list

2) Customer Testimonial- A simple quote from a happy customer about how your product or service helped them or fixed a problem, a measurable result achieved, or link to a video testimonial that you host on YouTube.

3) An Offer- Do you have a white paper, discount, or promotion currently running to announce?

4) Event Schedule- Link to the event page on your website or directly to an industry event you plan to attend.

5) Quick Fact- What’s the post popular selling product last month? What do your customers view as the greatest challenge for them next year? Gather important insights and facts with a simple online survey tool and share results in each issue.

The final challenge is committing to frequency so that your audience will come to expect your newsletters. Write your first 3 issues at the same time. Line up 3 customer quotes, 3 notable events worth covering, and 3 facts to share from a single survey. Remember, this month’s event can become next month’s main article. That’s a formula for successful newsletters in 2009.

Back to the Fundamentals

Want to learn more tips from the experts at VerticalResponse? Attend the webinar! March 11th at 10 a.m. Pacific Time

Tags: "Back to the Fundamentals", newsletters, partner, tips, VerticalResponse
Posted on March 5th, 2009 | No Comments »

When we present a seminar to a group of business owners, we always ask, “Who here is in the marketing business?” The answer usually is, “Just YOU.”

It’s really a trick question because the simple fact is: anyone who operates a business of any kind is in the marketing business. Otherwise how would you build your business? Every time you book an ad in the paper; run a radio commercial; send out a flyer; launch a web site, or any other activity you engage in to promote your business, you are in the business of marketing!

And now that we all understand that, the point is: in order for that marketing to be effective, it must convey a “Strong Idea” about your product or service to those people you are trying to reach.

Most of us market in ways that are interesting but not sensational, truthful but not mind-blowing, important but not “life-or-death”. You probably don’t have many resources to back your ideas. You don’t have a multimillion-dollar ad budget. Your ideas need to stand on their own merits.

You need a way to make your marketing messages stick. You need a Strong Idea.
A Strong Idea is one that gets attention, is understood, is remembered and changes something. That is, a statement, an offer, or a visual that will stop your potential customer in her tracks, and compel her to change a buying habit.
A Strong Idea can be a catchy headline e.g. “We Paint Every Car We Repair GREEN” for an environmentally friendly auto paint shop. Or, it can be an offer using an unusual visual: “If You Can Finish This Steak in Ten Minutes, Desert is On US” with a picture of a waiter with a pie in the face!

Strong Ideas are about simple action. They use vivid, concrete images that cling easily to memory, and they tap into emotion. And you don’t need to be a marketing guru to have them. Subway’s advertising campaign that focused on Jared, an obese college student who lost more than 200 pounds by eating Subway sandwiches every day was a huge success. And it started with a single storeowner who had the good sense to spot an amazing story.

So why don’t more of us use Strong Ideas all the time? Sadly, it’s because we know so much about our business. We suffer from enormous information imbalances.

When we discuss “unlocking shareholder value” or “our customer focused approach to business” or even “we believe in building relationships through face-to-face interaction” we know what we mean – but our prospects don’t, and they aren’t going to invest time finding out.

When a restaurant advertises “fine cuisine and a great atmosphere” to someone who’s never visited, prospects have no compelling picture in their minds of what the experience will be like. They might not know exactly what “casually elegant dining service” is.

It’s a hard problem to avoid. You can’t unlearn what you already know. Your only option is to take your idea and transform it – but, for heaven’s sake, make it a Strong Idea!

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker are the Marketing Masters (www.MarketingMasters.ca), a full-service marketing and advertising partnership that helps build busy businesses. Send your ideas on How to Thrive in Times Like These to liz@marketingmasters.ca or ken@marketingmasters.ca, or call 1-866-908-5720.

web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca
blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

Tags: Duct Tape Marketing Coach, Elizabeth Walker, Kin Burgin, Marketing, tips
Posted on March 4th, 2009 | No Comments »

Guest Post from Elizabeth Walker and Ken Burgin

Today we’re sharing what we call “ideas to steal”. They are all real-life ideas from successful businesses — action steps you can pick up and run with right away, without having to research, test or otherwise delay implementing. And, you don’t need to spend money to do them.

Pick three that you can sink your teeth into, and don’t hesitate to contact us if you want more information or help implementing them — these days we all have to work together.

1. Bill faster. Your receivables can count for 40 – 50% of your actual assets. Don’t batch invoice: bill as soon as you can. (See The 10 Most Dangerous Accounts Receivable Pitfalls  at: www.sterlingservices.ca).
2. Simplify your business. Weed out the unprofitable and the hard-to-sell.
3. Simplify your marketing message. Read  Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. (www.madetostick.com).
4. Get your business and your web site listed in relevant directories. To find directories, Google the name of your town plus directories url” (e.g. “cobourg directories url”).
5. Learn to delegate. Figure out what you do that turns dollars. Then delegate the rest.
6. Encourage employees to explore more efficient approaches to their tasks instead of relying on their standard way of doing things.
7. Don’t forget suppliers. They might not be on your payroll, but they are more apt to do a few things for you at no charge because you really take care of them.
8. Work faster. If you can condense three four-month jobs into three three-month jobs, you can do one more job in the year.
9. Reward your team for meeting budgets and time lines. A 5% bonus is cheaper than a 20% increase in costs.
10. Cut overhead by automating most of the non-producing items like accounting, customer care, voice mail, sales reporting, ordering and record keeping.
11. Make sure you’ve clearly outlined project scope, and don’t be afraid to charge your customer for changes.
12. Offer to be a spokesperson on your specialty when your local media need an expert opinion. Send them a relevant press release every month.
13. Give something valuable away on your web site; at your front counter; when you send out your invoices; when you deliver goods. This should be free to you, but valuable to the recipient, for example, coupons or a “How To”.
14. Highlight offers, features, promotions and news in your email footers, invoices and letter signatures.
15. Start accounts with Twitter.com, Facebook.com and LinkedIn.com and post articles. (Get a good overview at: http://odeo.com/episodes/24070501-Guy-Kawasaki-Reveals-How-To-Use-Twitter-As-A-Twool).
16. Go where your audience is on the web. If your potential audience hangs out on forums, then post to those forums. Become a trusted advisor.
17. Get your supporters to refer you. Check out “Make A Referral Week” (www.makeareferralweek.com) to learn more about how referrals can build business.

Elizabeth Walker (thinking and words) and Ken Burgin (creative genius) are the Marketing Masters. They are both Duct Tape Marketing Authorized Coaches. Liz leads seminars in business strategy and communications at the Schulich Executive Education Centre, York University. We are thrilled to be working with small businesses and entrepreneurs everyday, and derive considerable joy helping them build busy businesses.
web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca
blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

Tags: Duct Tape Marketing Coach, Elizabeth Walker, Ken Burgin, tips
Posted on February 27th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

The Wrap-up

So you’ve completed your webinar. You had good attendance, the subject was well received. Your slides were sharp and supported your talk in a way that left everyone excited about your topic.

Everyone has left the webinar room and returned to their regularly scheduled day.

Time to wrap it up!

Links -  More than likely, you mentioned some resources during your presentation. If you thought ahead, you had a slide dedicated to information and resources you talked about. Make sure to tell people they’ll be able to get these links or even be able to download the slides very soon. Perhaps on a special post on your blog or in a follow up email.

Special Offer – You’ve more than likely presented this webinar to conntect with customers or potential customers, so give them something worthwhile as a thank you. A special deal just for the people who signed up or attended.

Follow up -  Don’t forget them! You worked hard to find and cultivate these new leads. Don’t just leave them hanging. Keep in touch with your webinar attendee’s. Send out a survey asking what they liked and what they didn’t like. Connect with them about what they’d like more of in the future.

Mistakes will happen-   No matter how well you plan or how much effort you put into making the event the best one ever, you’re going to have some mistakes. Own up to them. Apologize for them and then move on. Learn from them so they don’t happen again.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Tags: tips, webinar
Posted on February 26th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Guest Post from Elizabeth Walker and Ken Burgin

We are rabid fans of growing loyalty among Ideal Clients over pretty much any other tactic. It’s the lowest cost sales activity you will ever engage in, since you are already doing business with them, you already know what they want and need and you can easily find out if they are being wooed by someone else. How easy is that?

And yet…we have hundreds of examples of business owners who not only don’t take advantage of this fantastic opportunity, they positively destroy it. See if you recognize yourself in these stories (yes, they are all real).

A client who spends $100 a month in your salon calls to make an appointment only to find her favourite stylist has left. Or even better, who calls for an appointment and lands in voice mail saying the salon is closed for renovation. You lose $1200 a year.

A customer who has been leasing his upscale cars from you for years needs some emergency service. Your service centre is booked up so you tell him you’re too busy. The customer not only takes the car somewhere else for service, he never comes back. You lose a lifetime value of $500,000.

A customer buys over a thousand dollars in clothing and accessories. He is particular but happy to spend to get the quality he wants. He leaves the store and never hears from you again. You lose the $10,000 he would have spent with you over the next five years.

A client who spends $35,000 a month gets a call from her ad agency saying they have to let the client go so they can pitch a potentially bigger prospect in the same industry. The agency didn’t get the other client, the client who was “fired” bad-mouthed them for years, they lost over $400,000 in revenue from her and it cost them close to a million dollars to go after the client they didn’t get.

What would it take not only to keep those customers, but grow them by 25%? Without spending a cent you wouldn’t have spent anyway? Without even investing in a web site, if you don’t already have one?

The first step is a database of every single customer who does business with you. If you can, link it to your point of sales system, so you know how much they spend, on what, when. At the very least, set up a spreadsheet with different columns as follows: first name, last name, street, town, postal code, phone, email, and a column you can put an X in for the kinds of products and services they buy. Since your computer already comes loaded with Excel, that’s free.

The second step is to sign up for an automated email service like www.ConstantContact.com. Sending to up to 500 names, more than you will ever need, will cost you about $20 a month – almost free. And the first 60 days are completely, 100% free.

Stay tuned for real life ideas you can steal to grow your business without spending money.

Elizabeth Walker (thinking and words) and Ken Burgin (creative genius) are the Marketing Masters. They are both Duct Tape Marketing Authorized Coaches. Liz leads seminars in business strategy and communications at the Schulich Executive Education Centre, York University. We are thrilled to be working with small businesses and entrepreneurs everyday, and derive considerable joy helping them build busy businesses.
web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca
blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

Tags: Duct Tape Marketing Coach, Elizabeth Walker, Ken Burgin, Marketing, tips
Posted on February 24th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

So you’ve got your topic, you’ve been sending information to and inviting your customer base. You’ve advertised it on your blog and Twitter and Facebook/MySpace.

Now what?

Send a reminder – email your registered attendee’s their login information and all important information right before the event. This will make them more likely to click over and attend. You’re looking to create that “Oh yeah!” moment with them.

Prepare - Don’t try and wing it, practice your presentation – and make sure to time it. Do a walk-through. Soup to nuts, as Tim is so often saying. Make sure as many of the kinks are out of your webinar as is possible. You probably won’t catch them all, but at least you’ll be better prepared.

Presentation - The way you approach and create your slides is important. You want to make sure they’re visually appealing and offer key points to what you’re talking about. But stay away from shoving as many words as possible into your slide. Make the slides easy to read. Short and to the point. Try checking out some really great slide presentations at Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

Support- The event will go better if you have another pair of hands and eyes. Have someone there to help field questions, monitor the Q&A window and in general be a helping hand. If you Twitter, consider making a #tag for the event. For our last event the hashtag was #dtmpa. There is a great explanation of what Hashtags are and how they came into exisitance can be found on the Twitter Fan Wiki.

Bonus tip- As a presenter, you want to make sure you’re giving as professional a presentation as possible, so think of the little things before you begin. If you’re sharing your computer desktop for the presentation, check out your background image, hide icons for your favorite games or shortcuts to websites. Turn off your instant messenger, your Skype and anything that might give off an alert or “take over” your focus during the presentation. Because Murphy’s Law is never more in effect than when you’re presenting something in front of 200 potential customers.

In the final part we’ll go over follow-up tips.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Tags: Marketing, tips, webinar
Posted on February 23rd, 2009 | No Comments »

Barry Moltz has founded and run small businesses with a great deal of success and failure for more than 15 years. He’s also the author of “Bounce! Failure, Resiliency and the Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success”. He is an enthusiastic speaker and teacher on entrepreneurship.

The 11 things that matter in a Business Plan

What problem exists that your business is trying to solve. Where is the pain?

What does it cost to solve that problem now? How deep and compelling is the pain?

What solutions does your business have that solve this problem?

What will the customer pay you to solve this problem?

How will solving this problem will make the company a lot of money?

What alliances can you leverage with other companies to help your company?

How big can this business get if given the right capital?

How much cash do you need to find a path to profitability?

How will the skills of your management team, their domain knowledge, and track record of execution will make this happen?

What is the investors’ exit strategy?

Please remember, the business plan is basically an “argument” where you need to state the problem and pain, then provide your solution with supporting data and analogies.

Barry Moltz

www.barrymoltz.com
Twitter: barrymoltz

Tags: Barry Moltz, business plan, planning, tips
Posted on February 22nd, 2009 | No Comments »

Our guest author today is Barry Moltz. Barry has founded and run small businesses with a great deal of success and failure for more than 15 years. He’s also the author of “Bounce! Failure, Resiliency and the Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success”. He is an enthusiastic speaker and teacher on entrepreneurship.

8 Things You Need To Start a Business During a Recession

1. Sell Painkillers. During difficult economic times, people only buy when they are in pain or have a very great need. Focus on selling the painkillers in business not vitamins. Understand who is in pain and who has the money to solve that pain. Understand who solves that pain for them now and why they will switch to you. (hint: the answer can’t always be price!)

2. Find Lunatics Like You. Business’ ideas are meaningless. It’s all in the execution which means that it’s only about people. Find the people that you want to start a business with and stick with them. Build a strong personal and professional support structure — you will need it.

3. Show Me the Customers. Forget about the fancy business plans or the extended analysis. Go out and ask prospects “Will you buy my products?” That answer will be the only one your business needs.

4. It’s Cash Flow, Stupid. Get customers to pay in advance or with cash when they buy. Start-up business is about your cash flow not profit. If you can get your customers to pay a deposit or pay you when you deliver your product your company will be stronger.

5. Pick the Niche. In the beginning, focus on being the best at delivering one thing. Don’t stretch yourself and your resources too thin.

6. Give Crazy Customer Service. Outstanding customer service, unless you are a utility company, is the only sustainable competitive advantage. Do it!

7. Be Cheap. It’s your money. Spend no dollar before its time. Find resources that are both variable and available. Don’t grow yourself broke by increasing your fixed overhead costs.

8. Don’t Bet the Farm (or any other part of your property). Many times, businesses need to evolve and change. Don’t bet all of your money on the initial vision of your company. Keep some of your money in reserve in case you need to alter your direction.

Barry Moltz
www.barrymoltz.com
Twitter: barrymoltz

Tags: Barry Moltz, business planning, start a business, tips
Posted on February 19th, 2009 | 3 Comments »

With another webinar in our “Back to the Fundamentals” series under our belts, I thought I’d speak a little to the power of offering your customers a value add of webinars.

Last Wednesday we had the fabulous John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing in to talk. He did a great job as usual and gave some really useful tips to the attendees. (You can listen to this webinar by going to the Back to the Fundamentals page)

Putting on a webinar is a lot of work. But if you plan right, it will go off without a hitch. Hosting free webinars or training sessions is a great way to give added value to your customers.

For instance -Palo Alto Software, in addition to the B2F series, hosts informational training sessions for all our software products every single month. The archived sessions are hosted on our website for people to watch them “on demand” and are always free.

In this first piece, let’s talk about the set-up.

Part One -Before the Event:

Create some goals- How many people would you like to register? How many people do you want to actually attend? (This number will typically be a smaller number than the number who registered). Will you push your product or service during the event or offer them a special price afterward as a thank you for attending.

Make all these decisions before hand because they will change the way you map out your webinar plan and market it.

Google Docs – If you’re working with a team of people, ie your webteam or IT person, a guest host, etc, it’s best to have your milestones and work flow written down so no one misses a deadline. Even if it’s just you, this is a great tool to keep your thoughts in order and you can access it from anywhere. I use Google docs because it allows me to share with all the people working on the event and allows real time collaboration without having to juggle multiple versions of a word doc and play “who has the most recent schedule” with everyone.

Webinar platform – Webex is arguably the most popular webinar platform out there. It’s a powerful and useful system and can handle a large amount of attendees. But it’s not the only game in town. There are other companies out there like  iLinc, or  ooVoo for very small one-on-one video webinars… do some research to find the one that works best for your needs and budget.

Topic – Have an engaging subject to talk about. While I’m sure you’re very excited to talk all about the product you want to sell, most people wouldn’t give up an hour of their day to sit through your demo. But? You’re an expert in your field, share your knowledge. Find a topic and focus on a portion of it. Give the attendee’s action points and give them something they can use right away. Information doesn’t count for much if they don’t understand how to put it into action.

Outreach- How do you plan to tell people about your event? Use your customer base to start with. These are your evangelists! Do you send out a newsletter? Include an article as a preview of the subject along with a link to register for the event. Send an email blast with just the basics of the event. Don’t overwhelm with too much information. You want to entice people to the event, not give them all the information before hand. Create an event alert in your Facebook or Myspace. Twitter and write blog posts supporting the topic and always include the link to register. You might think about creating a “badge” that goes along with everything. Think of it as the “logo” for the event.

Create excitement- You don’t want to flood your attendee’s but you do want to create excitement that they’re going to get a lot of good and valuable information by attending your event. Consider sending a survey a few days before the event to ask what they hope to get from the webinar. Listening to your audience will not only give you insight on what they’re expecting but also gives them a feeling of being engaged and included in the event and give them more incentive to attend.

Next time we’ll go over tips for the webinar itself and what goes on after the event is over.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager, Palo Alto Software

Tags: Marketing, tips, webinar
Posted on February 18th, 2009 | 1 Comment »