Tag Archives: Marketing

As recent as the late 90′s just having an IT department set you apart from your competition and gave your company an edge, but by the early 2000′s it wasn’t enough anymore. Every business worth its salt had bought computers, built networks, and setup servers. IT had gone from a luxury to an appliance.

In the late 2000′s the same sort of shift occurred in web design. First, just having a website gave you an edge, then it was SEO that put you on top, now it’s social media, community involvement, being human and transparent, or content marketing. Web design and SEO are now standards – it’s what else you do that sets you apart.

How to Set Yourself Apart from Your Competition

If having a great website and search engine optimization are now the new baseline, then how will your company stand out against the competition? The smartest people in the room are saying three things:

• Humanize your business.
• Consider your community.
• Create great content.

Humanize Your Business

Mimi Henderlong of Threadless says, “Staying human creates loyalty,” and part of being human is making mistakes, “Mistakes are OK! Even can bee good.” International advertising firm, gyro, says that people don’t buy from businesses, they buy from people. Consider telling a story about someone who works at your company and make your customer the hero. Be as transparent as possible. Share what your company believes in and why the employees do the things they do. You may have heard that people don’t care about what you know until they know how much you care, but as Simon Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Start with why.

Consider Your Community

Threadless is a community-powered ecommerce website that is highly engaged with it’s community, partly because of Mimi’s work, who believes there are four core values of a healthy community:

• Benefit – What is the benefit to the community? Why does someone join a community?
• Influence – Do users have influence? Do they know what to do?
• Belonging – Do they feel like they belong? Do they know what to do?
• Empowerment – Ambassador programs, elevate members, badges, camps, events

Create Great Content

“I don’t care about what you care about, but you should,” said Merlin Mann of 43 Folders when talking about priority. Merlin is passionate about helping people do more with their lives by doing less things that don’t matter and focusing on doing things that are great. If you focused less on the email that comes in every 4 minutes to the project you’ve been trying to complete for the last 4 months, do you think you could complete it faster? Is the project really a priority if you keep checking your email? Does the project even matter? Merlin Mann says, “If you say ‘yes’ to everything there’s no time to make something great.” And great content is one of the primary things that will set your company and yourself apart from your competition.

Grow Your Business Organically

A lot of SEO companies market how they will promote your business online using Internet marketing and online advertising techniques, but Watershawl noticed a gap between where promotion stops and business begins and so we used social media management to not just promote your business, but grow your business.

Digital Marketing Strategy

We’ll work with you to create a comprehensive strategy to marry your business brand, vision, values, products, and services with traditional outdoor, radio, TV, and yellow page advertising alongside social networking and social spaces like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other technologies like apps for the iPhone and Android phones.

SEO is Not Enough – Content Marketing

It’s no longer enough to have a top-ranking website in Google if your web site is not converting traffic, your story is not consistent, and you are not creating lasting relationships with customers. Watershawl can help you to do all three with content marketing.

Social Media Management

We are excited to offer social media management to help your business organize and streamline their marketing efforts with a consistent message that is in-line with their mission, vision, and values. We believe so strongly about this product that we would be happy to take you out to lunch to show you how it works in a one-on-one session. Are you interested in learning more?

Merchants who sell drills are in fact selling pieces of mechanized metal, but the actual reason for the drill’s existence is to make holes. What the merchant is really selling is the hole.  The person buying the drill either wants to make a hole or drive a screw.  That’s it.  If they didn’t need one of those two things, they wouldn’t need the drill.

So how can we relate that to our customers? Are we trying to sell our customers “the drill”? Are we helping our customers sell the drill or sell the hole? Why are our customers customers buying their product? Is it because of the product or the result they get from the product? Of course it is the latter.  We help customers identify what the “holes” are, what the end results of their products are and sell the solution, not the tool.

Currently there are many social websites that have created a platform for you to speak directly to and with your current and future customers.  There are also many tools that help manage this relationship, pushing the same content out to all platforms at once, or changing it slightly using built in rules.  There are no hard and fast rules for the Web 2.0 landscape because it is all still so new, but what we can do is look to those businesses who are having success in these new areas.

We measure success by the three methods, “know, trust, buy.”:

1. Brand awareness. (Does the customer know you?)
2. Brand favorableness. (Does the client trust you?)
3. Increased sales. (Does the client buy from you?)

Blasting your message out to one or as many social media sites as you can will help get your brand more noticed, and so achieve more awareness, but you also need to be genuine.  The best Internet marketers make sure to engage with the customer and not just try to sell them something at every turn.  The medium lends itself to this sort of engagement and turning down the opportunity to do so may break the trust, or the brand favorableness.  Once you have established both the know and the trust, then the customer feels free to buy from you, but there is value to both brand awareness and brand favorableness even if the one who you are impressing does not buy.  Once the goodwill is out there, the person you engaged with may refer you to someone else.  Like the butterfly flapping it’s wings, even the smallest twit on Twitter may lead to a hurricane sale on the other side of the world.

Peter K. Francese, President of American Demographics, is famous for his rule of thumb, “If you get more than two replies for every hundred pieces of mail you send out, you’re doing great.”  This is because in the old days, a 1% return on a direct mail marketing campaign was considered successful and eventually became the standard.  Recently, some email marketing companies have touted returns as high as 1 in 57, but once you convert that to a percentage, it is still in line with the overall average of 1-2%.  So is direct mail or email the best route for your business?

Gary Christensen, who has been writing about making profit through the mail since 1973, recommends a “2-Step Method”.  The first step is mailing as many small ads as you can in order to draw inquiries.  These ads should contain something for the reader in exchange for contacting you.  The second step is to process the iquierers by contacting them by phone or another round of mail.  The same could also apply to email.  In this way, you are spending more money only on those who may actually be interested in what you have to offer, rather than sending out more information to more people first, which is more costly.

However now that we have discussed both the traditional ROI and the 2-Step Method, you can see that there may be a better way to gain more customers or clients for your business.  The more targeted the ad, the less money you need to spend, and the more the return on investment.  This is how Google, Bing, Amazon, and other online advertisement companies have changed the marketing landscape in the last decade.  Instead of blasting out your message to 99% of the wrong audience, you can pay to only speak to the people already searching for your product or service.

If you have more questions about promoting, advertising, or marketing your business, services, or products online, please contact Erich Stauffer at http://watershawl.com.