Market Differentiators: product = service

Here’s a new tip on market differentiators.

First, we’ve explained this before, but let’s review what a market differentiator is. It’s some specific action you take that sets you apart from the competition. Don’t imagine “corporate-like sales talk here”. We don’t mean you’re reliable, honest, fair, fast, affordable, or any number of other adjectives. Everyone says those things. Have you ever met a competitor who tells clients he’s unreliable, dishonest, unfair, slow, expensive, etc? All the adjectives are not differentiators. They make you sound like everyone else. They’re same-inators.  Sounding like someone else who marketed like that is some people’s idea of marketing, which is why we can all pop off with those things in our sleep – we’ve heard them a million times. Everyone says them. And no one’s listening anymore. Back when marketing was born, you just didn’t have to work that hard at it. If you said “I’m reliable” people went “wow, ok then”. But after everyone started saying it, from your insurance agent to your landscaper, it became marketing-ese, not marketing.  Market differentiators are verbs. They’re the things you *do* (verb, action, activity) that are tangibly different. If you say “we deliver reliable reports” (gong! thanks for playing anyway – you just sneaked in another adjective). No, you need to actually do something differently in a sea of sameness. If you aren’t doing anything differently, that’s your very first marketing task.

OK, now the tip. Service = Product, Product = Service. When you’re creating market differentiators (remember, these are verbs), turn a service into a product, and a product into a service:

• If you offer a service like report writing, or contract selling, or brokering a deal, bend it a little toward being a product, a tangible, a deliverable. You might include extra visual aids, you might offer a free course with your service, or you might deliver backup documents on a thumb drive, or offer free backups of related documentation for a period of time (that’s adding an additional unusual service to a normal service – that’s great, too). These are just some examples. The idea is to add value.
• If you offer a product like cosmetics, classic automobile body parts, or used books, include a service-oriented extra action or activity when people buy your products. Examples: ship free if you pay with direct bank draft instead of credit card (you save money and pass it on to your clients, and you set yourself apart). We won’t spend a lot of time here talking about monetary perks – there are lots of ways to do those, and that’s what consulting’s for (call us for an appointment). Something different: when you buy parts from us, we pre-etch them, before we ship, with the number of your choice, in case your ride is ever stolen. You see what we’re aiming at. Do things differently. Add value that the other guys won’t.

One more example – this is adding a product to a product, which is also nice: The local coffee shop I go to makes blueberry pie. So do a lot of people. So what? These guys make home-made blueberry pie. There’s an adjective for you – “home-made”. Again, so what? When Olive Garden can toss out that word “home-made” it doesn’t mean much anymore. Here’s what they do differently. Most “home-made” pies use a shortcut like canned pie filling or a pre-made crust. The pie filling is especially common. These guys don’t do it that way. They put fresh blueberries in a pressure cooker and they make the pie filling. Then they make the pie out of the pie filling. That’s a tangible, verb-based, “we *do* this differently” difference. It’s a market differentiator. Actually, for them it’s not, because they don’t tell anyone this. If they put it on their web site, NOW it’s a market differentiator. You get the drift.

Anyway, product=service, service=product…. or add a service to a service, add a product to a product. It’s a great way to think of adding value – by actually adding something. That’s it. That’s a tip that works for us, and we think it can work in your marketing.

More free advice from Market Moose internet marketing. We think about this stuff all the time, because someone needs to.

Site Navigation Theory Made Simple

Web site navigation can make or break the best web site, the best content, and the best intentions. At first glance, the single most obvious sign of a web site that has not had a professional treatment is the navigation. There are a number of basic things that navigation theory can lend to your site build that will help make it a winner.

Keep it Few: Generally speaking, on a business site, if you’ve got more than half a dozen horizontal (top) buttons or links (your primary navigation), and more than half a dozen vertical (side) buttons or links (your secondary navigation), you’re losing people through clutter frustration. You’re actually adding challenges to locate information. There’s some give and take, and there are lots of successful sites that ignore this rule, but they’re also doing it on purpose for highly specialized reasons.

Use Hierarchical Navigation: If you need more than half a dozen buttons each for primary and secondary navigation, it’s time to nest them with parent and child pages. This is a sign of well organized content, and it invites your visitors to think in a more marketing oriented manner.

Navigation equals Marketing: Your main navigation should have the same helpful things that a home page would on a static site: who you are, what you do, where you do it, why choose you, what to do next. Translate that into buttons and you get the classic navigation schema: ABOUT US, SERVICES, COVERAGE AREA, OUR DIFFERENCE, CONTACT US (or BUY NOW).

Use Posts vs. Pages: Lots of pages of original content can increase SEO (search engine optimization). But don’t overestimate static pages. Dynamic sites beat static sites most of the time, so a single BLOG page frequently updated with fresh, original, relevant posts is the best use of one button there is. Better yet, if you want maximum SEO burn, make the blog your HOME page. Also, a blog page has it’s own forms of tertiary navigation – tags, categories, etc. You don’t need button overload when you blog. If you’re about to create a new page, ask  yourself why it can’t be a post instead?

Blur the Boundaries: One of the techniques we use a lot is to use posts instead of pages, but keep the posts in categories – for instance, instead of using an FAQ page, we use an FAQ category and just add posts. That affords us some nifty additional features that static pages often don’t have.

Keep Names Simple: Don’t name a button or navigation link “General Information About Our Company”. Name it ABOUT or GENERAL or INFO. Or, if you need to look expansive, ABOUT US. Whether you choose CONTACT US or CONTACT is not a preference worth agonizing over. But a button called “Contact Us Any Time 24/7 By E-mail or Phone” is silly.

Keep in mind that about 25% of your audience will not make a decision to contact you without being able to research and find all of the information, in a well-organized manner on your site, that they need to make a decision. For them, navigation has got to be effectively organized into some sort of rational structure. Another 25% of visitors won’t contact you without being able to quickly access the straightforward, bottom line options they need to decide. For them, navigation has got to be simple, obvious, and meet some standard expectations.

Follow these general guidelines from web site navigation theory, and your small business web site will likely be more effective at converting more hits into actual contacts.

Market Moose helps small businesses build effective web sites, search engine optimization, and internet marketing.

Where is Everyone? Try Facebook!

Ask yourself, “where is everyone these days?” When I was a kid, groups and social networking was extremely popular. It’s not something invented in 2004, despite the constant regurgitation of old articles and news vignettes about how networking is helping job seekers and career folks to get opportunities and small businesses to grow. We used to meet at everything from the Rotary Club to Toastmasters. And not to knock those cultural institutions – they’re still  popular, and I’m sure they’re still effective. We’ve even seen reported growth at such gatherings, and new groups forming, in the wake of the current economic situation. But it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the growth of social media, often for the exact same purposes.

“Pssst! There over here, in Facebook!” I’m  betting there are more conversations happening in Facebook every hour, on the average, than in all of those in-person social networks put together in an entire day. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Craigslist, MySpace… that’s where the people are. They’re in social media.

Some would decry this and say it’s depersonalizing everything, and undermining the growth of local cultures Sure, maybe some. Those are reasonable points. But it’s also doing things that weren’t happening before, and which occasional national conventions didn’t solve. It’s letting people in outlying towns, neighboring states, or half way across the globe connect, interact, and yes even exchange referrals and do business. And there are plent of local and regional groups, pages, and entities in social media. Social media is also rich. It maybe isn’t the same as a handshake, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily less substantive. The plethora of new kinds of exchanges in social media – from sending someone a virtual beer or flowers, to starting an instant poll on something you said, to tagging one of your photos with commentary and sharing it with one’s own audience (people you had no access to before), social media is like handshaking on steroids. It’s the grip that keeps on giving.

It can water down some kinds of relationships - some business owners find that people coming in off of Facebook, Twitter, or Craigslist can be more savvy and informed, more immune to persuasion, more price and comparison driven, more exposed to a variety of competitors, and often they have a bottom line they’re aiming at that’s already well defined. We get the same kind of traffic at times here at Market Moose. Someone who e-mails “quote me a price” without even a clear idea of what they’re pricing – “for what, exactly?” Often when we suggest an initial consultation to understand their needs, they just move on. Good riddance. Seriously, it’s not Burger King vs. McDonalds. If that’s what you want, go someplace with a virtual drive through – they are plentiful – it’s just not our niche, and not every client is our client. But we do get just as many people who appreciate the difference of a custom fitting over suits off the rack. And if you use social media to inform, advise, offer insight into that difference – if you can make a convincing case, without pitching everyone, without sounding like an ad, for a different kind of service, then you can really see your business grow from social media.

If all you’re offering is, “Hey, I’m in Facebook too. Buy my stuff.” you’re going to get a steady stream of “Why should I pay you more than the next guy’s bottom dollar?” I mean seriously, do you look left and see gas at $2.49, look right and see the same gas at $2.09 and think “same difference”? You’ve either got to *be* different, and communicate the importance of difference, or you’ve got to run out to the sign and slap a zero over the four, and then it’s just you and them and a price war. It’s like the housing market is right now – you’ve got to throw in a flat screen TV to bribe the buyer, because listings are everywhere and, often, it’s all being presented as just square footage – it’s a commodities market.  Your services are going to be a commodities market, too, if you don’t set yourself apart. We’ve written before about “marketing differentiators“, so we won’t go into it again here.

But once you’ve decided on your niche, your market, and made yourself unique, it’s time to make yourself the obvious choice, and that means getting into social media and creating a culture and a following around your ideas, your difference, your independence from the commodities pricing that’ll kill your competition, while your difference insures your survival and growth. Do participate in in-person social networks, if you’re a locally based business (that’s *participate* not show up and hand out business cards). But if you really want to reach numbers, use social media effectively, and you can often connect with a bigger set of prospects in an hour than in a month of hand-shaking. Again, not knocking the Rotary Club, but some of them get this fact and are adapting for precisely these reasons. If you’re in Facebook, for instance, check out the Rotary Club of Santa Paula, California.

How Does Google Know if I Copy?

One of the common questions that comes up is “Do search engines like Google really know if I shoplift content from other web sites to update my own?” Another is “Out of all the millions of web sites, how can they know?”

Ask  yourself the following: if Google isn’t also indexing those sites, how would it index your site? How would such a thing as SEO exist? That’s what search engines do – they scan your site for content. There’d be no SEO value in adding content to your site, if search engines weren’t aware of it, or aware of the same content on other sites. And Google reads your site just like a human being – top to bottom, front page to back.

Here are the results you may find from lifting content:

SEO decline. This happens by rewarding the site that had the duplicate content first (it’s copy-worthy – that’s an endorsement – rank it higher) and lowering rankings for the site that had it later – i.e. lifted the content (it’s not original – no sense in presenting it high in search results). When I post, Google is usually aware of my content within seconds. I know – I monitor it. I have automatic scans in place for content theft, but still – I know that a plague falls on the house of anyone who rips it off, because of the way SEO works. [Want to see a Google example? Click the image at right.]

Legal issues. One of these days, the site owner is likely to run his popular material through copyscape.com and see who is using it without permission. [Want to see a Copyscape example? Click the image at right.] Here are the questions they can pursue: “Are you a business? How long have you profited from having my content on your site? How much money did you make in that time, and what percentage of it is due me?” If you could write stellar content and just wait for people to rip it off, you could actually make a business out of it, with a good attorney. It’s the same with multimedia content: grabbing images (photos, graphs, etc.) off the internet that have not been explicitly declared ‘public domain’ and for which you do not have an appropriate license, or are obeying the terms of that license. You’re probably exposed at that point, unless you can make a case for “fair use” – a rule which has its own vague terms, precisely so courts can apply the rule un-evenly and favor whom they wish. We’ve written about fair use on this blog, so we won’t revisit it here, but we’re not attorneys and aren’t competent to offer real legal advice, so if you have questions about it, you should consult an attorney.

Ethical issues. Keep in mind that plagiarism is plagiarism. If it was cheating when you copied that book into your essay in school and represented it as your own, instead of properly attributing it to the author, it’s plagiarism when you do it with web content. If you are going to attribute it, that’s better but doesn’t mitigate the other issues.

Public perception. When someone goes to bookmark your content in a social bookmarking site like digg.com, they will likely get a response that this is duplicate content that has already been bookmarked. This exposes you as a content lifter. Are you a business? What are the potential consequences of a client looking at your site as just a collection of things grabbed from other web sites?

Low social value. Focusing on just SEO is a common mistake of those who believe in the mythology of automatic marketing, and it misses the whole point of why SEO works the way it does. Fresh, original, frequently updated content is rewarded in search engines PRECISELY because that’s what people are searching for, want to interact with, and are responding to. If you’re just slapping in stuff you find on the web content, generally speaking, you’re not really respecting your prospects, how they think, and what they want – you’re just feeding them filler – which means you think people are basically dumb in their buying responses and will warm to any old thing. You’re trying to fool them with fake attention. It’s like a pat on the head – just a bit too patronizing – and if you think that doesn’t come through, subtly, there you go again underestimating your prospects. You wouldn’t put up with it, so why should they?

A dynamic web site is a social entity – an interactive environment. If you really don’t care enough, and don’t respect the visitor enough, that you’re just dumping things into it from other sites, why should they care and why should they stick around? Content is a social compact – you’re promising to be genuine, authentic, and alive. It’s easy to say “blogging didn’t work for me” – it might make us feel better, but it’s really the assumptions we’re acting on that make the difference. Treat people like people – talk plainly – and you’ll earn an audience. Take shortcuts, and it’s like one of those “filler speakers” for hire that will show up at your company for a fee and talk about whatever – give them a topic and a time frame and they’ll come speak “dynamically” for that 30-minutes or an hour – from puppy dogs to sales to motivation to time management. Wow. It’s like serving cheap crackers and cheese whiz at a convention. Everyone’s thinking “how long do I have to stay here?” That’s not a buyer response.

And if I seem blunt about this, it’s because you’re up against the obsolete marketing-think of our grandparents, where people would often buy whatever you throw at them, if it was reasonably new, because there just weren’t so many products on the shelf, and there just weren’t that many plumbers in our town. It was a seller’s marketplace. It doesn’t work that way any more. Look at the shampoo aisle at your supermarket and start counting. Check the phonebook – that antique they keep throwing on the porch every year – how many of your profession are there in your area? Now, we actually have to respect our audience enough to be real. It’s a buyer’s marketplace now. That’s the meaning off social media, of blogging, and even of Google, my friends. The assumption implicit in any successful internet marketing activity today is that we’re searchers, explorers, social people – instead of the web being a ‘marketing engine’, it’s a marketing conversation. It’s more like coffee hour than the sermon, more like a ball game with friends than a scorecard and silence, more like personal coaching than ‘here’s your gym badge, over there are the machines’.

I’m going to push this farther. So much of the time, at Market Moose, we’re offering a corrective – nudging people away from the pitfalls (we’ve all fallen into them – that’s how we know they’re there). But our mission is also to coax clients toward a newer, more current, more realistic vision (as in corresponds with the new reality) for their marketing. So here goes. It’s not just about your marketing. It’s about your business – the substance of who you are as a business and how your business works. I’m often hearing people say, “in my field, marketing doesn’t work” – but I notice that their successful competitors don’t think that at all. In every field, in every locale, someone is making money and being successful marketing their business. I notice that same crowd is often saying, “here’s how I work, we all do the same things, this is what I do, it hasn’t changed in 40 years”, etc. In other words, they’re not adapting or responding to the new reality – they’re telling people how it’s going to be, what they’re willing to do, and doing the take it or leave it thing. However you slice it, this is the old way and, yeah, if your business doesn’t change, you can have stellar marketing, but it’s just a facade. What’s needed is a fundamentally different approach to your own work. It’s amazing how much the new marketing then starts to make sense.

Ever driven up to a run-down roadside motel and heard “$79″… and when you say, “gosh that’s expensive for this!” they just repeated, “$79, plus tax, plus key deposit”. They get away with that for one reason only – there’s no alternative. The moment I open a motel across the street that’s clean, with well-lit parking, hot coffee, and a security guard, they’re gone.

The things we need to be thinking about are:

• How can we increase and maintain better communications with existing clients – communications that go beyond just the purchasing process?
• How can we begin a conversation with the public about our field of work – but, more importantly, about the aspects of it that the public is actually thinking about?
• How can we give prospects a way to stay connected to us, stay in our orbit, even before they’re ready to switch to us or include us in their business plans?
• How can we position ourselves, in all our locales, or in our particular specializations and niches, as the resident expert – the one that is the clear choice – without throwing a lot of sales language at people (“Hey, I’m the best. For quality, buy from me!” -  bleh)?
• How can I build a wider network of people (and where are they all hanging out these days?) that isn’t just people that are immediately “valuable” to me, but anyone and everyone I know, meet, or have a conversation with? – Remember the insurance agent analogy I gave in the video on new marketing.

More of us don’t want to walk in and shake your hand, we want to add each other to our Facebook. I don’t want you to mail me those mortgage rates – I want to see them by following you in Twitter. I don’t want your five page static web site that never changes. I want you to think about what I’m thinking about and give me some insight. Ever visit one of those old-fashioned personal home pages from 10 years ago – it had someone’s favorite colors, they’re favorite rock bands, a bad photo, etc? Ineffectual business web sites are still like that. Well, individuals are way ahead of a lot of companies that expect their business. Individuals are involved in constantly updated statuses and always adding funny stories, interesting thoughts, etc – to their pages (which are now in Facebook and Twitter more than they are in Tripod and Geocities). Businesses are playing catch-up. And not just in how they ‘market’, but in how they do business as a whole. Sometimes, it’s time for an overhaul not of just your web site, but of who you are as a company, and how you operate. It’s that, or join the dying part of the industry.

I have three marketing mentors – three people that, for me, have summed up successful marketing right now:

• Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People). What’s funny is that web 2.0 and social media, like blogging and Twitter, are seeing the fruition of a market based on Carnegie’s thinking. And yet Carnegie started this in 1934. What’s also funny is that it quickly got the reputation from people who hadn’t read Carnegie, of being manipulative – it was actually thought to be more ‘honest and straightforward’ to just make or do stuff and assume people would buy it, tell them endlessly to buy it by bombarding them with ads saying it’s good, and so on. Carnegie saw that stuff as antique back in its heyday. There were Mad Men and there was Carnegie the visionary. And you know his primary idea? Simple: if you genuinely take an interest in people, in general, whether or not they can do anything for you, or seem immediately ‘valuable’ (as a commodity) – if you just interact with them, meet them, add them to your social network as people – you’ll never have to seriously chase business. You won’t have to constantly pitch them on how your services are the best, etc. Again, we talked about the insurance agent in video on new marketing and those guys are disciples of Carnegie.
• Seth Godin (Tribes, The Purple Cow, etc.). I don’t even like everything Seth is interested in or talks about (some of his books are, in my opinion, overly focused on corporate life). But you can’t argue that he can really nail down the underlying ethos and thinking behind the new marketing – the new way of doing business.  Tribes is short (read it in one sitting), and really gets you there.
• Google. Just looking at the meaning behind Google’s activities tells you what has changed, often before it actually has. Google is prophetic. Google understands that we’re offloading more of our activity and thinking online – and that includes our social networking, our buying decision process, and our expectations for interaction. Google knows that documents aren’t static anymore – they’re evolving social tools. That’s why Google is reading your home page like a human being, using artificial intelligence, instead of the old-fashioned way of just picking up key words some SEO person inserted on the back end. They get it, they’re helping drive it, and the rest of us are learning from it.

Well, I think we’ve answered the key questions. Market Moose is available for consulting, including brainstorming for your business. Let us know if we can help.

Audio: Do I Really Need a Consultant?

The Value Proposition: “Is Small Business Consulting Worth It?” From the Market Moose Podcast.

Interview of Market Moose founder Daniel DiGriz by Steve Pruneau (Free Agent Source). Daniel explains how consulting services, specifically in the area of internet marketing, can pay off for small businesses, even if you’re not used to working with consultants.

“Why re-invent the marketing wheel, by trying to learn it all yourself?”

Music: “Recercar 2” by Paul Berget (Magnatune label)

Standard Podcasts [16:58m]: Play in Popup | Download

Daniel: I’m Daniel DiGriz with Market Moose Internet Marketing, we help small businesses grow by building an effective Internet marketing plan.

Steve: I’m Steve Pruneau from Free Agent Source, we create the best of both worlds for independent professionals and entrepreneurs. All the resources of a traditional company, combined with the freedom of freelancers and entrepreneurs.

Daniel: And this is the Market Moose Podcast bringing you interviews and insights to help your business market and grow on the web.

Steve: So Daniel today we’re going to talk about, how is it that consulting can create value for small business, is it really worth the cost?

Daniel: We get that question a lot. Because a lot of businesses start out, especially small businesses not being used to paying people for ideas. It’s hard if you’re a one person shop for instance, to pay another person for just what they think or just what seems like talking. But in actuality, spending money on consulting can be one of the most effective and wisest business investments you can make. After all,  you’re a specialist in what you so whether you’re an attorney, an appraiser, a psychologist, etc. So, getting a specialist involved to help you do something like Internet market. Someone that brings knowledge and experience that you might not have, somebody that can bring an aerial view to the topic and give you some real direction, so that you’re not just kind of swimming in the wind, hanging a website out there, handing out business cards. That’s often the most effective way to spend your money, a lot cheaper than just throwing piles of dollars at an Internet mechanic that builds and builds but you don’t know whether it’s going to be effective.

Steve: Yeah but, a lot of us don’t want to be marketers. We have our own trade skill and our own profession that we want to basically get on with and how do we know that we’re really going to get something tangible back?

Daniel: That’s a great question. The beauty of consulting is this pay as you go. Right? now, a lot of people of course try to lock you into a contract, but I would avoid that really at all cost. An effective consultant lives on his reputation and lives on the strength that his advice and his coaching and his guidance and his expertise. So you buy a few hours, you start out with an Internet Marketing Consultant for example, and you see where it goes. and if that person is not delivering tangible results, if you’re not getting return on your investments, then you stop and you find the right person. Unlike hiring, sort of a technical specialist who’s knee deep in things you may not understand and has you locked into a contract and you’re already throwing huge piles of dollars at it. This is actually an effective way to make sure and measure that you’re getting tangible results.

Steve: OK, but isn’t this really just somebody’s opinion and couldn’t I find all these opinions on the web?

Daniel: Well that’s a great question. So, you really asked two questions though. One is, is it just someone’s opinion? And two, couldn’t I just get this information on the web? So let me deal with them one at a time. So, the first question, some of it is going to have flavor from a person’s personality, from their perspective, from their experience. That’s exactly one of the reasons you should be involved with a consultant as a small business. You may have a lot of experience with some technical facets of Internet Marketing for example, you may have built a website once, or you may have sent out an email marketing campaign. But nothing really compares to someone who’s had the experience invested in these things for years. So yeah, there’s a little bit of perspective if you will, I wouldn’t just call it opinion. There’re some real key points that you’ll find most Internet Marketers saying to you over and over again and so you can do web research and if you hear something from your Internet Marketing Consultant that sounds far fetched and way out there, there’s no harm whatsoever in Googling some of the terminology he’s using and see if what he’s telling you is something that other people are talking about.

But the other question that you asked is, “Couldn’t I just get this information off the web?” And the answer is actually, “Yeah.” Maybe a lot of Internet marketing people wouldn’t tell you that. But the truth is, depending on how many hours you have in hand and how much time you’re willing to spend, not only to get this information, but to sift through it, weed out the stuff that’s just snake oil. Because there’s a lot of that out there, there’s a mine field of people saying, “Hey, instant results. Guaranteed stuff.” And when you read their pseudo essays you’re looking at, “Pay here”, at the bottom and a PayPal link. So, you’ve got to be careful about the so-called information that’s out there. But you can sift through this stuff and a reasonable, intelligent person can go through it. Often times, there’s some terminology involved and there’s research on the research. So if I read an article that’s got six terms in it I don’t understand, I may have to open several more web browsers to really get what the person’s trying to tell me. There’s absolutely nothing to stop you from becoming your own accounting expert, your own billing expert, your own book keeping expert. But there’s a reason why small businesses tend to get an accountant involved or tend to outsource that. The same thing is true with Internet marketing. In the time that it takes you to do that research, it’s often easier for you to just go out and get another client, you could have been doing other work by now and the money that you make off of that should more than pay for your consulting professionals.

Steve: So is that what the value proposition is? Is it that, the money I want to spend here should get me the knowledge and I guess, the results faster and more efficiently than if I were to do it myself? Is that it?

Daniel: Well that’s always I think, the quotient isn’t it? In small business, it’s time versus money. So, one of the things for instance, I’ve done a little work in project consulting and one of the things that always comes up is we can do just about anything. Which do you want to spend more of? More time or more money? So, as a small business owner that’s really the case too. What you’re doing is you’re saving money by saving time. So you can invest that time in what you do best and your first question was, “Hey, I’m a real estate appraiser, I want to spend my time appraising and have somebody else do the marketing, I don’t necessarily want to become an expert.” That’s exactly why you get a consultant involved. You can spend those hours doing what you do best and making money and generating income or you can spend that time saving money by doing all the research yourself. I publish a blog called, the Rules of Work, rulesofwork.com, if you want to visit that, and one of the points we made in a recent article on that blog is that, it’s counterintuitive. But the best way a small entrepreneur or small business can spend their time, is not saving money it’s making money. If you look at successful entrepreneurs, that’s where their time is devoted. So, if I spend several hours to save myself ten dollars, if I spend a lot of time researching online because I don’t want to pay somebody the ten bucks it takes for them to do a small task for me. Have I spent my time effectively versus making three phone calls and getting a client that day. So that’s where the value proposition I think, comes in.

Steve: Wow! That’s very profound.

Daniel: Well, thanks. We like to hear that here at Market Moose.

Steve: Do you think some people just have a hard time getting over the fact that I’m actually going to put some money out there and all i’m getting back is this information, this consulting advice. Is that a problem for some of your clients?

Daniel: You bet. It’s a problem for some of our prospects but it hasn’t been a problem for some of our clients and I’m not being smart-alecky, but I want to tell you the difference. The difference is, yeah, if you don’t know what you’re getting, if you’re reaching out for an intangible, it’s kind of like the old P.T. Barnum thing, right? P.T. Barnum was famous for getting people inside of a circus tent with various oddities and things. But a lot of them were tricks, “Step this way to the Great Egress,” and when you went there, you were outside again. You paid five dollars to go to the Great Egress but it turned out, it was just leaving the tent because an Egress is an Exit. So people are wondering, “When I pay my five bucks and I go into the tent, is it going to be a scam or am I going to get something that I can carry home with me?” And that’s a fair question, which is one of the reasons why most consultants start with an initial consultation. So we do that, we have a free thirty minute consultation to start with. If we don’t deliver value in that thirty minutes or if your consultant, whoever that may be, whether it’s an accounting consultant or an appraisal consultant or a legal consultant, if they don’t deliver value in the first thirty minutes to an hour, chances are they’re not going to deliver value consistently over time. So yeah, you want the consultant to prove themselves and that’s why I say that, for our prospects, sure it’s an issue. But once we do the initial consultation for them, an overwhelming number of them become our clients. That’s us, we’re not trying to laud our own services. But that’s what any good consultant should be able to say.

Steve: Let’s talk about a different type of client and this might be someone who, maybe they’re willing to take the leap on the value proposition, but suppose it’s somebody who really doesn’t know much about the Web. Of course they’ll know their own trade and profession but wouldn’t know URL from HTML. How do you feel about working with those type of people and do they fit within the Market Moose client base?

Daniel: Sure, that’s a great question. Well, first let me say, not everybody in the world goes with our company Market Moose. I want to broaden that question and just say, “Is this the kind of person that an Internet Marketing Consultant would be helpful to.” So, there’s a couple of answers, some people don’t know anything about the Web and maybe it’s a generational thing or maybe it’s just that they spend their time with a tool box crawling under a house, and those are perfectly acceptable reasons. So, I will say that, most people do need to learn a little bit in order to be effective. You can’t simply outsource 100% even if you can outsource 98%. You’re going to have to know, I mean even just you making a judgement about what to pay for, involves a certain amount of consulting. If you come to me, for example, and you say, “Hey I want a website, because I’m convinced that a website is going to make me money.” It is my duty as an Internet Marketing Consultant not to just take your money. It’s my duty to say, “Look, things have really changed over the last five years. In the old days when there was only ten thousand websites out there, you throw up a website, it never changes, it has five pages, it’s like a static business card and you walk away, and if you have a website, yeah chances are you will get some visitors.” These days when there’s a hundred thousand websites, that’s really different, and that’s just your industry. We’re not even talking about other sites that bleed off your clientele. So in that market, it’s my duty to say, “a website alone, putting all your eggs in one basket isn’t necessarily the best choice. Maybe you should think about, having a website sure, but also doing a little bit of marketing in Facebook, or doing a little bit of marketing in Twitter, and we can kind of guide you through the mine field and make that easy to understand.”

It’s the duty also of an Internet Marketing Consultant to speak in plain English. I’m not going to throw a lot of terminology out there. The mythology is, well the word Technogeeks, right, and that may have been true again five, six years ago when all you had to do was throw up a website and hire a geek to do it. These days you really need somebody that understands small business,  how business works and how different kinds of industries really do grow and get clientele and then can talk to you just like you and I are talking now. So that’s one answer, the other answer is, that often our clients will start out with something tangible. I mean here at Market Moose we do hands-on work, mechanic work, so you can come to us and say, “I want a website.” We can say, “Sure,” and we’ll build it for you. That’s hands dirtying, toolbox type of work. But in that process, you’ll learn things because through our interaction you’ll pick up that, “Here’s why I’m putting these words in this portion of your site. OK, you’ve told me you want to include your resume on your website, let me give you a way to do that better,” “what if we format it like this because this is going to get you more clients. This is going to appeal to Google better if you do it this way,” and through that process, there’s a little bit of consulting involved and you start picking up the value of it. So, I think a lot of people, they start with a tangible thing in summary, and I think that a lot of people, basically it’s our duty to sometimes not just say yes and grab the fistful of dollars, but to push back a little bit and say that, “Not everything that you’re about to throw money at, is going to be the most effective.” And that’s consulting too, usually part of that free consultation we give at the beginning.

Steve: Yeah, I wasn’t sure you were going to touch on that and I was going to say. Now even if you’re a little bit concerned about being able to understand any area that’s new to you, if you take the jump, you get in touch with somebody who does know, then just that exchange is going to bring familiarity and confidence. And it’s why we have tour guides, it’s why we go with somebody who’s already been there. Just segueing to another point that you made, even though your firm or any other consultant that you hired to do something, generally they can’t do a hundred percent of it. Inevitably some of it comes back, and we have to do some of the work. I really wish I could hire a personal trainer who would really make me ripped.

Daniel: You and me both buddy. I’ve got a few pounds that I’d like to just put on his plate instead of mine.

Steve: Yeah, and inevitably what happens is, I actually pay them money to tell me what to do. But the reality is, if I knew a hundred percent of what to do, I wouldn’t have to pay him the money, and they do actually reduce the amount of time that I would spend. The same thing is true with the dentists. You’re paying money to the dentist and what happens at the end of the appointment? “Well, you really need to do this and that differently and now come back and show me the results.” And I think for some people who really want to avoid that, you can probably avoid a lot of it, but in the end you’re going to have to be involved. I don’t know of any business people that can’t be a hundred percent not involved. And so, if we are in business, I think we’re stuck. By the way, if you ever find a way that we can avoid being involved, let me know and I want to pursue that.

Daniel: Yeah, both with Internet Marketing and with losing weight. You bring up two great points. So one of them is, Gee, when we pay consultants sometimes we’re concerned that, “Hey, all I walked away with is advice this time on what to do better,” and of course that’s exactly why we pay. I joined the gym recently and the first day at the gym, I thought it was going to be like any other gym, and I walked in and I have a great doctor, I really do, but my doctor had given me advice and the advice was, lose fifty pounds, just the kind of thing you were talking about. So I go in to the gym and I say, “I need to lose fifty pounds and my doctor tells me that the way to do it is everyday I need to come in here and just pound it out for thirty minutes until there’s sweat dripping down my face and go as hard as I can.” And the personal trainer spoke up and said, “No, you don’t. Your doctor is almost right, you do need to lose the fifty pounds, we can tell that by looking at you, but what’s really necessary is for you to find your target heart rate and stay at your target heart rate. And that’s what our job is, is to help you find that. So we’re going to advice you.” So they modified the advice. So the beauty of that, and one of the reasons I’m still a member of that gym, is that I didn’t just go out and run as fast as I can around my block for thirty minutes everyday, which wouldn’t have been an efficient burning of calories. I wouldn’t have lost the weight as quickly. But I lost ten pounds in thirty days because I stayed within the target heart rate and followed the advice. So it was totally worth it. I could have done that myself and saved the cost of the gym, but I’d still be running around the block wondering why I have to eat a ton of calories to put that stuff back.

So, the other issue is owner involvement, and yeah, Internet Marketing does not work without some owner involvement, and so people always say, “How involved do I have to be?” “I don’t have a lot of time, I don’t really want to do this.” The answer is, “Look, the owner involvement stuff, is the fun stuff. You hire me for the boring mechanic work and you hire me to educate you and give you the main sense of direction, but if you’re willing to spend thirty minutes a week on your business doing some stuff that’s kind of fun, you can grow your business significantly through Internet marketing.” You can hire us to do the specialist work, but thirty minutes a week, if you don’t have thirty minutes a week, ten minutes every other day, five minutes everyday on the average. If you don’t have that, your business is not going to grow anyway and no amount of throwing money at it or buying an online solution that, “Hey, I’ll spend a thousand dollars on this, they guarantee results.” None of that is going to be effective. When somebody calls you up on the phone and says, “Nope, you don’t have to do anything, just give us your credit card number and the address of your website.” Do not give out your credit card number, it’s not going to be effective.

Internet marketing is just like invoicing, it’s just like accounting, it may feel like pulling teeth sometimes, it may feel like a trip to the dentist, but it’s part of your business, it has to be done and it requires a certain amount of your involvement. You can’t just go to the dentist for a cleaning very six months, you have to brush your teeth and floss, right. And we all hear that and maybe we floss more than we did before. The same thing happens with Internet marketing. I tell people often, “Hey you need to update your website, you can’t just leave it sitting there in a coma because if there’s no signs of life, why should anybody interact with it or give you an order.” So people say, “Oh yeah, I know, it’s been three weeks.” and I’m like, “OK, but you got to get it in gear.” and so I become the dentist, you’re totally right. But without a dentist or without a personal trainer, I’d really hate to think where I’d be right now.

So, again i’m Daniel DiGriz with Market Moose Internet Marketing and we help small businesses grow by building an effective Internet marketing plan.

Steve: And I’m Steve Pruneau, I’m a guest. It’s been my pleasure to speak with you Daniel, thank you.

Daniel: So this is the Market Moose Podcast, bringing you interviews and insights to help your business market and grow itself on the Web. Thanks very much for joining us today.

Effective SEO Solutions

Effective SEO involves front end SEO, back end SEO, & external SEO! White hat techniques. Updated for Web 2.0 & Google.

• Front End SEO: consists of strategic placement of content, judicious use of internal links, and dynamic content opportunities.
• Back End SEO: involves search terms embedded in many kinds of tags on every page, as well as XML site maps, and other techniques.
• External SEO: ranges from effective use of social media to marketing through off-site content, effective back links, etc.

You can do a lot for your site, and we can help through consulting or a dynamic site build but, for some SEO, you may want us to do the hands-on work.

Effective Hyperlinks

Title Tag Optimization

Building Back Links

Social Media & Brand Strategy

Save time and money with strategic consulting and advice. Niche Marketing. Lead capture. Guidance for small and medium-sized business growth.

If money is tight or you are strongly self-motivated, consulting services can be your single best investment, and can make a huge difference as we guide you through the avenues of growing your business with internet marketing. Consulting is actually the least expensive but most effective way to start making real changes immediately.

Internet Marketing Plan: A comprehensive marketing plan allows you to prioritize, leverage the most effective venues and extensions of your time, and utilize your funds efficiently and sensibly. Don’t go forward haphazardly “trying” things on the web. Let’s build a plan together.

Brand Growth Strategy: Are you positioning yourself as resident expert, and growing your business by expanding your brand? Want to learn how? You need brand launch consulting.

Social Media: Do you know how to use Twitter and Facebook effectively for your particular industry and local market? The Web 2.0 world is new, and the rules of success have changed. Having a human guide can be a strong aid to success. We can set regular consulting appointments to keep you making progress and extending your brand.

Niche Marketing: Want to branch out and start going after a particular demographic or locale? It’s simpler than you might think, using a variety of techniques in addition to a niche site.

Lead Capture: Are you maximizing all your marketing options to build a pipeline of interested prospects for the future? Are you attracting new clients, and converting them into actual contacts? If you lose 25% of your clients per year from attrition, then you understand the adage “if your business isn’t growing,  it’s dying”. Do you have both fat and lean times? The best time to invest in growth is when you’re busy.

Web Site Marketing Appraisal: Comfortable working on your own web site, or just don’t want to throw money at it and hope for the best? Stop wasting energy and effort and get a game plan. A web site marketing appraisal will tell you exactly what things you need to add, change, move, update, revise, or correct to make your site an marketing engine in the center of your marketing plan.

Training: Need custom webinars, hands-on training, someone to walk you through doing effective blog posts, social media use, etc? We do this all the time.

The Perils of Small Businesses Imitating the Corporate Web

It’s one of the great insights about growing and sustaining your small business that you can adopt and adapt many of the processes found in corporate life. I utilize corporate interaction tools – from calendar invites for meetings to action items to status updates. Corporate standards like specification documents, sign-off on scope of work, followup points, and appropriate deliverables are also part of our processes. This is all well and good. One great thing that corporations have developed is internal processes that yield standardized, repeatable, sustainable results with consistent payoff. We can all learn from that.

It’s one thing to borrow corporate processes, but there are some real perils in borrowing corporate style. Web sites are a prime example. So often, web design for small business revolves around trying to look like a corporate site. Everything bland, everything under one brand, very little connectivity, most of the effort is spent on trying to limit the footprint, control the visitor, and keep everything under one roof. Disaster for small business. A better model is Web 2.0 startups. Startup businesses who are doing on the web what the corporate committees are afraid to, are doing it quite successfully, and are taking a huge chunk out of corporate market share.

Corporate web sites try to brand everything themselves, and omit anything that would require sharing space or credit. They pay extra to put their own name on other people’s services.
Web 2.0 startup web sites collaborate with lots of brands, giving that collaboration prominence. When you see “we integrate with Harvest, Outright, and Shoeboxed” you’re in a Web 2.0 environment.

Corporations focus on the web as a medium for transactions. A virtual cash register or billboard. They are slow to catch on to social media, blogging, and other forms of interactivity. Most sites still provide only a contact page. Or if there’s more, they make it secondary. Their first entrance into social media is usually like their site content – a form of advertising, which most people treat a lot like spam.
Web 2.0 startups make staying in their orbit primary. Social media links are prominent. The focus is on brand loyalty by joyous participation. They cultivate their “tribe” by adding value constantly – blogging free information, insights, and advice – instead of making everything a sales pitch.

Corporate sites make everything clean, pristine, and formal. The better ones have a real-ish mascot person (Progressive’s girl, Subway’s guy). But the interaction that would actually come with real people is pushed to the back.
Web 2.0 sites give you some genuine human scruff. There’s plain talk, photos of real people, and your comments are often part of the front page. They not only say they want feedback, they often feature tough questions from clients.

Corporate web sites take feedback from a contact form. In response, you get a form letter, as the first try.
Web 2.0 web sites make feedback part of the site itself. They include a forum, or invite public blog comments, and usually the response is personal – from either a ranking employee or a captain or guide among dedicated fans invited to help newbies along.

Corporations hire a firm to get research on what you think, want, and will buy.
Web 2.0 startups crowdsource their ideas. They ask you what you right on the site, and in external social mediums like Twitter.

Corporate web sites put their services above everything. The focus is top down. ‘Here is what we offer. Which one do you want?’ The landing page is mostly static. It’s as though social interaction were an afterthought. The equivalent is that person we all know who shakes hands and then asks who is your insurance carrier.
Web 2.0 web sites include generous dynamic content on their landing page, which not only gives them better search engine optimization (SEO), it seems like someone is home. Services don’t take a back seat, but the site is also not just an ad sheet.

Corporations are trying to extend their brand into social media (like Facebook and Twitter), but they really don’t get it. Mostly, contacts revolve around their web site, and their service or product offerings.
Web 2.0 startups start out in social media first, often while the web site is under construction. They often build a community *before* offering products or services. Their brand is not dependent on the web site. The site becomes the central hub of their marketing, but not the sum of it.

Comparisons are plentiful, but the point is this: Anyone can throw up a corporate-style web site. There’s actually a formula – just like there is for most corporate processes. A lot of research has gone into it. Some of it’s right, and some of it used to be right, but hasn’t been in what, for the web, is a long time. You do need the basics – a Contact Us page, an About Us page, a Privacy Statement, some Terms of Service (TOS) for online participation. But merely duplicating the corporate footprint and slapping a blog and some social media icons on top of it, does not make you effective in a web 2.0 world. What does, actually, is rethinking your interactions with prospects so that you can attract new types of clients to build your tribe (again, referencing Seth Godin’s book Tribes) and compensate for client turnover.

In other words, it’s not all about the web site, and it’s not about tossing up the right pages, which can be done in a few hours. It’s about completely re-envisioning how relationships with consumers are built. That’s what web 2.0 means for small business. It means you can’t just copy anymore, because consumers have gotten smarter than that. It means you can’t just build it and expect that they will come. It means, more than anything else, that you’ve got to be involved. Small businesses that won’t hear that won’t be successful in this medium, the new web, the internet market not as it will be, but as it has already become.

So next time you’re looking at web sites to imitate, whether it’s corporate ones or your competitors, stop. Instead, look for people to imitate. That’s the meaning of the new web, also. The web site doesn’t mean half a damn, if you’re not doing what the successful people are doing. Even if you just duplicate some web 2.0 site, it doesn’t mean it will be successful for you. And not because your industry is different, or your clients are special. It’s because copying doesn’t work anymore – not the way it once did. What good is throwing up a blog if you’re not going to do with it what businesses who have been successful with blogging are doing with theirs? What good is having a new logo and a presence on Facebook, if you’re just going to camp there and wait for people to find you – that’s not what successful web 2.0 businesses are doing with their logo and facebook account.

You’re going to need a marketing plan – an approach that goes beyond merely acquiring widgets to add to your web site. It may be an unpleasant truth to businesses that aren’t prepared to change, both how they do marketing, and some internal processes accordingly, which is what consumers influenced by web 2.0, whether they realize they have been or not, will require. If cultural change is not part of your small business culture, then you have something else to learn from corporations. It’s not how to build a web site. Those guys are still back in the 90s on that one. But what corporations often have down, or at least pay good lipservice to, is the need for change management as a routine part of the business. The need to adapt as the public changes. One can easily find a lot of small businesses, especially single-owner shops that, in the face of a changing outside world, just keep their heads down and keep plowing away with all the more vigour at the same old thing. And with varying degrees of success. You often get something for working twice as hard – it’s just that it’s not usually twice as much success.

If you don’t know much about how to approach the new web, the new consumer, and what to do about your internet marketing, that’s when you need an internet marketing consultant. I’m really not trying to tout our services. There are lots of qualified people. We’re here, of course, but our approach is to keep giving away insights, advice, and information, for free, and we figure those people who should become our clients will be. If we take care of everyone, some, by offering tips, tricks, and not shirking on the substance, people will take care of us, too. That’s how we do web 2.0. Now, if you’ve read this far, you’ve got to ask yourself how you are doing it. And if you represent a corporation, you already got this information from those firms you hire to give it to you. Whether you heard it or not, well – that’s really the question.

Telling it like it is. Market Moose.

The Rules of Using Photos on your Web Site

Imagine going to a web site trying to sell you professional services.  You work in an office. You dress well and take care of personal hygiene. But when you get there, the staff photos are scruffy looking, frowning, mug shots! What’s your buying response like at that point?

A lot of people wonder whether they should even have personal photos on their site. If your pets look better than you do, should you really have personal photos at all? Should you hire a model?

Sites with no personal photos look dead. So yeah, you need photography with actual human beings in it, if you want a response out of the 50% of visitors who are socially motivated. Whether it’s you, clients, or just guys that look good in their Dockers, you need something – and make sure it’s on the landing page, at a minimum.

Most people look decent in decent clothes and with a smile. No need to hire models. I’ve been building business web sites for ages, and I have yet to see someone so hideous that a coat and tie, or some professional attire, and a genuine smile makes a bad photo.

Dress like your clients. Here’s a tip – if you get your hands dirty for a living, but your clients work in an office, put on office attire. The reverse is true too – just ask every politician that speaks at an AFL-CIO rally. If you work in an office and your clients get dirty for a living, ditch the tie and put on a blue collar. Maybe even a hardhat, or hold a clipboard. Dress like your audience.

Use a flat background. Whether you get portraits made, or are just taking staff photos outside your building, get some photos in front of a flat background of only one color. It can be a good idea to get in a skyline or something, but a background that’s too busy distracts from your other graphics and site colors,  like your  logo. And try to avoid shadows! Photos with flat backgrounds and no shadows can be easily photoshopped for various uses, cutting out the background without losing part of your hair.

Get professional portraits. Eventually, you’re going to need these. Your photo is part of your brand. It’ll be your avatar in places where you aren’t using a logo – like maybe Twitter or Facebook. It’ll be your personal motif you add to e-mail newsletters and web sites. Pay a photographer and tell him you don’t want to buy any prints at all. Just the disk, please. Why scan photos in, reducing their quality, when you can start out digital? No one wants print versions for professional work. Go digital, and get it done in the right light, with lots of different poses, so  you can take them home and use different ones for different purposes. Make sure you’re leaving with at least a 2-3 good images that you like on that disk. When people listen to what you say, they are also looking at how you look. If you’re in a hurry and need it tomorrow, CVS and Walgreens do on the spot passport photos. Tell them you want a plain background and maybe an angle shot at your face instead of straight on, to avoid the mugshot look.

Wear the glasses sometimes. If you wear glasses, get photos with and without. And ask professionals in your target audience for their opinion on your final pics. Personally, I don’t like having my glasses on in my photos, but they do make me look smarter and also more approachable. Without them, I’m more like an alley cat. With them, I’m like a well-heeled Russian blue. So, I wear them for pro pics.

Using models isn’t wrong. You may want some professionally licensed model photography for your site. Don’t swipe it off the net, or you’ll regret it later. If you use it, pay for the right licensing first. The plain truth is that about 10% of the population looks better to 90% of the population than 90% of us do to each other.  If you’re looking for people who look truly happy, fit, excited, beautiful, and involved in whatever you’re selling, that’s exactly what models do. And small businesses should take a cue from the big guys in this regard – commercials, corporate sites (often doing many things wrong, they do this part right), product catalogues – these all use models for a reason.

Invite everyone who works with you. The front person needs separate photos, but staff photos are quite effective for marketing and company image, also. Whether your people are employees, contractors, colleagues you share work with, or just a couple of family members who join you part time, and maybe a temp from an agency, invite them to do staff photos for your web site, and individual photos and bios for staff profiles.

Get permission. If you use staff photos, get a release form signed for use of their photo on the internet. And not the old-fashioned model release forms that don’t have clauses for internet use. Get one that’s up to date, with the web in mind. I won’t post mine here, because I’m not a legal expert and not offering legal advice. But if you want a copy, and you’re already a client, feel free to request it. I’ll share it as a “this is what I’m doing” – not as a “here’s what you need”. Consult an attorney – that’s what they’re there for – to keep you from meeting other people’s attorneys.

Resize and crop those darned things! The biggest issue, literally, we see with photos provided by our clients is that they’re the size of a wall. Lower the darned resolution on that camera to the smallest it’ll do. Photos for the web need to be fast-loading. Windows picture viewer fakes it, by showing you the size you expect, but that’s not the real size. Use something like irfanview (and tip the man for using his software – it’s worth it) to see the *real* size. If you’re taking pics at maximum resolution with you’re camera, you’ll probably see an eyeball filling your monitor. Yes, that’s how big it actually is. You can use the same software to resize your existing photos to something reasonable, like 400px width. Even if you *display* the photo at smaller width on your site, it’s loading the entire photo every time someone loads the page, slowing down your site, chewing up  your web space and bandwidth, and all for nought. Don’t waste the net, or your money, or your visitors’ time. Shrink those photos for the web. And crop out the needless backgrounds. If there’s a table edge in one corner, use the same software to crop it. Rule of thumb – show what’s relevant – omit what’s not.

Don’t make your business site a personal home page. A lot of people want to put photos of their cats, their favorite vehicles, or their kids on their business web sites. As someone who does internet marketing, I walk gently here, unless I think the client is open to advice. But my general advice is, unless you’re a micro-business and family or pets or your vehicles are part of your brand, don’t. There’s a difference between a personal home page, which has your favorite songs, colors, etc. and a business site. The former is what Myspace is for. It’s free – use it. Better yet, if you’re in business, use Facebook for that. You’ll get more value. Your business site needs to appeal to the model visitors that constitute your prospect and client demographics. And they’re looking for specific kinds of content. If you don’t know what to put on your site, that’s what an internet marketing consultant is for. We’re happy to help, or there are others out there.

That’s it. Straight, no-nonsense advice on using your photos on your web site. Let us know if you think of something we’ve skipped. We’re always accumulating new ideas and insights as well. Have fun. I can hear those digital cameras clicking away already.

Why Should Anyone Do Business With You?

Defining Your Market Differentiators

What’s really different about your business? It’s not uncommon to hear a plumber say “I do everything” or a lanscaper to say “I do the same things as every other landscaper”. If that’s so, your marketing has either come to an abrupt end – pack it up and go home – you’ll have to survive without it – or it’s just beginning because, starting from nothing is different is a great way to *begin* your marketing.

First, if it’s really true that you’re not doing anything any differently than anyone else in your field, then why should anyone pick you over anyone else? Sometimes the answer is, “I don’t know. You’re the marketing guy, you tell me.” All right, I will. There isn’t any reason. There isn’t any reason, and mere SEO isn’t going to help you. All those SEO gurus out there selling you on how you’ll be first? No you won’t – the guy who is different will get more business than you.

Second, often it’s just a lack of imagination. Someone once said, “all real estate appraisers do the same thing.” Really? Are you sure? I’ve dealt with a ton of them, and I can tell you that is absolutely not true. Your competitors are coming up with unique ways to add value all the time, because that’s how they’re getting clients that you are not. Some people guarantee a response to all queries within 6 hours. Some guarantee one-day turnaround on any drive-by appraisal. Some include satellite photos with every report. Some send all reports by both PDF and mail. Some include a 3D sketch. It’s not that hard. Useless, you say? Really? Their clients don’t think so.

You should get a copy of The Purple Cow by Seth Godin. And if you can’t take advice on learning something new, frankly, you don’t deserve new clients, so I feel free to recommend books here. Seth will give you a lot of case histories of companies that did unusual things that didn’t even necessarily add tangible value. Some added perceived value, some added a perk, some added just something to get attention. That’s the purple cow. It works, folks. It really does.

In a related profession, Home Inspector, there are a lot of people who focus on just the report. “What?” they ask. “Should I use a bigger font?” Maybe. I’ve known one professional whose secret was the quality of the deliverable. It was full color, highly illustrated, graphic bullets, and clean, clear headers, etc. Clients gave him referral business by showing off the quality of his reports vs. his competitors. So did it make a difference? Hell yeah! What about the inspector that includes infrared imagery? “Silly gadgetry,” I’ve heard some grumble. So? So freaking what? He’s being silly all the way to the bank, while you’re just clowning around trying to pay for more directory listings. It makes him stand out. It makes him rock in the eyes of the people shelling out cash for his work. So even if he spends $750 on the tool and doesn’t charge a dime more for his reports, how much is one more referral source worth to you? If you’re in his business, it had better be worth more than that or you’re seriously underpaid.

Third, market differentiators aren’t horse manure. They’re actions. Put verbs on them. If it doesn’t come with an “I include,” “I deliver”, “I provide,” it’s not a market differentiator. People aren’t buying more talk, they’re buying action. If your market differentiators run something like this, “we have the experience, the quality, to deliver in an ethical, full-service environment… blah blah blah” then yeah, you’re just like everybody else. You’ve got to find your purple cow. Even if it’s just a professionally produced report cover, or something. But the best market differentiators are ones that you can describe – on your web site, in your e-mail tagline, in your voice mail (you *are* using those for marketing, aren’t you?). The best differentiators are ones that, even if a client says “I don’t need that.” you can respond with a warm smile, “That’s OK. It’s just one of the little premium extras we like to provide our clients at no extra cost.” Now that’s kick-ass marketing!

So do it now. Sit down and create three things you do differently that the client can see. If you get 2, give yourself a B. If you got none, then it’s time to decide on what they’re going to be. You can’t sell boredom, sameness, blandness, and ‘the usual’ in restaurants. Even McDonalds is always trying to add something new. You can’t sell “our cars have indistinct, non-descript lines, ordinary motors, suspensions, and wheels” unless you’re also saying (ahem… Kia) that you’re kicking in a 10year warranty, a super low price, and a refund program. And if you wouldn’t buy it, why would anyone else? Get on it! Go sit down in a cafe, send the waitress away to avoid interruption, and write down whatever comes to mind in a notebook. It may quite possibly be the best hour you’ll ever spend on your marketing. And we’re here, not to tout ourselves, but if you need consulting time to help nail some of this down, we can do that. We succeed for one reason – well, two – we’ll tell you the truth rather than sell you a false instant fix – and our only goal is your success. If we think about that, and that alone, people will take care of us. This might give you a hint at some of our marketing differentiators.

Market Moose – Difference is Devastating

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