More on Learning Styles: Why, What, How, What If?
The other issue to keep in mind when looking at the best ways to get your marketing people ramped up quickly is whether they are a “why,” “what,” “how does it work,” or “what if” learner.
There’s a whole chapter devoted to this in Teach What You Know, by Steve Trautman, which is a wonderful book all about teaching peers and people you are mentoring what they need to know to do a good job.
The entire book is full of gems – my copy currently has about 20 pages bookmarked. If you ever do mentoring or any kind of informal training, I recommend it highly. He’s also got an excellent website at www.practicalleader.com.
Here’s the short version of the chapter on learning styles…
“Why” learners
“Why” learners want to know why they should care – why they should be learning this, why it is important, why focus on it now. So start your explanation with this. Read more
Who Can Refer Business to You?
As you are building out your nurture marketing program, make sure you include all the people who could be referring business to you.
Spend a little time every quarter brainstorming about who else is engaged with your prospects and might be able to tell them about your products and services. Consider each of these 11 groups listed below, and you will come up with lots of people you can add to your list.
1. Partners
Start your list with business partners and other people who are already referring business to you. You definitely want everyone who is already making referrals kept current with what’s going on at your company, and you want to sell them on being an exciting, growing firm.
Consider including former partners, if the partnership ended on a positive note, as well as prospective partners.
2. Complementary businesses
Whatever you sell, I guarantee that you do not sell it in a vacuum.
• There are products and services that are sold into businesses and to consumers before they are ready for yours.
• There are products and services that are sold in conjunction with yours, as part of a complete solution or because the timing simply works out that way.
• And there are products and services that your customers aren’t ready for until they have used yours.
Find the people who sell those other solutions, and include them on your list.
3. Competitors
Yes, competitors. Those businesses are out there working hard to generate leads, just as you are. And no matter how good you are, you are not the perfect fit for every lead that comes to you. A competitor might be.
So look for competitors where the differentiation is pretty easy to find – perhaps they are much more expensive or much less expensive. Or perhaps they target a different market.
When you are including competitors, you might want to make sure the person you mail to is someone you know – someone you may have met previously and know would be open to making referrals back and forth. That means you’d be looking for someone in sales.
That can double as a recruiting pitch, by the way. Make it look like your company is growing and doing very well, and you might be able to lure away a top rep (if you want to).
Although, to be devious, there is also the benefit that seeing regular mailings from a competitor can be really annoying. If that’s the kind of relationship you have with your competitors, that can be fun too.
Of course, if you have competitors on your list, you want to check before each mailing to make sure what you are sending is appropriate for them to receive. You might not want all your latest news to go to them right away. So you might flag these individuals in your database so you can easily do that check.
4. Respected advisors
There are consultants, accountants, lawyers, and other professionals who work with your prospects. There are also thought-leaders, bloggers, editors, celebrities, influencers… Think through who your prospects respect and look to for advice. It might be advice relating to your product or service, or it might be unrelated – just someone they respect. Bringing your business to the attention of people like that can be very worthwhile. Remember, these don’t have to be people you know (yet).
5. Associations and professional groups
Are there people in associations, professional or fraternal societies, or any other kind of professional or social group who might be in a position to refer business to you? Add them to the list. People in groups like this can be very well connected.
6. Social networking contacts
You might know people through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, online communities, listservs, discussion forums or social networks who you would want to include.
7. Customers
Satisfied customers are a great place to look for referrals. You will have to decide if you want to include your customers in this list or not. Some of your customers will be better connected than others and find it easier to make referrals, so you may want to include some and not others. You may have too many to include, and many of the mailings will not be appropriate for customers.
But when you are sending educational articles or information about new products and services, it is an excellent idea to include your customers. You want to keep them up-to-date with what’s happening with your company and what your offerings are, and there’s value in reinforcing for them that yours is an exciting business where cool things are happening.
Think about including former customers too. Sometimes you have a customer who stopped working with you for any of a number of reasons but still thinks highly of you. They might be in a position to refer you. So keep them up-to-date with what’s going on.
8. Prospects
Many businesses will include prospects who are in the pipeline in their list. It’s a great way to educate them about the value you provide and demonstrate that yours is the kind of company they want to do business with.
9. Employees
A lot of businesses overlook the value of keeping their own employees involved. If yours is a very small business, this might not be an issue for you. But particularly with so many people working from home now, a lot of people who work outside sales and marketing don’t have the latest information about what’s available from the company. If you think they might be able to make referrals, include them.
Think about former employees too. They might be working for a company that would make an ideal client.
And don’t forget prospective employees – people you are trying to recruit. Educate them about your offerings and you’ll help sell them on your company – plus they’ll hit the ground running when they come on board.
10. Former coworkers
If you or others on your team have former coworkers who might be able to refer business, consider including them too. You might brainstorm about who you know that might be a good referral candidate.
Don’t forget people you were associated with at your former positions – vendors or clients. They might be good referral sources.
11. Other
Whom else do you know who might refer business to you? Let your mind wander… By now you’re either exhausted with the possibilities or your brain is churning and coming up with one brilliant idea after another. If it’s the former, come back to this next quarter. If the latter, keep going! The more people you have on your list, the more referrals you will get.
Learning Styles: Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic
When you are working with a marketing freelancer, one of the critical issues you need to deal with is getting them ramped up as quickly and effectively as possible.
They need to learn about your company, your products and services, and the way you want work done.
If you can find out how they learn best, and teach them that way, you’ll save a lot of time and effort. Plus you’ll get better results because they will absorb the information more effectively.
The first thing to find out is whether they are visual, auditory or kinesthetic. Read more
5 Ways To Increase Credibility On Your Website
Why does credibility matter? Credibility is the essential third step that has to happen before you can make a sale.
The first step is Findability. People have to be able to find you – they need to know that you exist and that you can solve their problem.
The second step is Education. You have to educate people about how you can help them, what you will do, how much it costs, and why they should do business with you rather than anyone else.
Once you have jumped over those hurdles you still have the third step – Credibility. People need to believe that you will deliver what you promise – that it is safe to do business with you.
So your website needs to send the message that you will deliver what you promise, that you get good results for the people you work with.
How can you do that?
A recent Stanford University research report* identified all the different ways people evaluate a website’s credibility. Here are 5 tips based on that report you can use right now to increase the credibility of your website.
1. Design Look
While you can’t judge a book by its cover, most people judge the credibility of a website by its visual design. This is the biggest reason why it’s so important to engage the services of a professional graphic designer for a new or redesigned website.
Besides a pleasing overall layout, you should consider things like typography, color scheme, and ample use of white space for your website. You don’t want your prospects or customers to think you threw the site together haphazardly in your friend’s garage. More than any other factor, a professional-looking design helps you prove to your prospects that your company is the real deal.
2. Navigation Ease
A well-organized website is critical to establishing your site’s credibility. If you are thinking about redesigning your site or creating a new one from scratch, think carefully about how the site should be structured from the user’s perspective. Try to put yourself in their shoes. Why are they visiting your website? What do you want them to do when they get there? How can you make it easy for them to complete a simple task such as filling out a contact form or downloading a white paper?
The best way to answer these questions is to create simple outlines and page mockups called “wireframes”. The good news is you don’t need to be a graphic designer to do this and it’s easy to test out different scenarios. You can simply sketch them out on a white board or with paper and pen, or you can make more formalized page mockups using Microsoft Powerpoint or Word.
Besides enhancing your website’s credibility, this exercise helps you remain focused on your site’s goals. Also, doing this before you hire a professional designer will likely save money by reducing the possibility of major changes later in the project.
3. Information Usefulness
Another big credibility factor is information usefulness, meaning how relevant your site’s content is to your audience. In order to be useful, any information included on your website should be relevant to both the business and the end user.
How do you know what’s useful to your audience and what’s not? Ask. Online surveys and direct interviews are the best way to determine what people want and need from your website, and both can be done very inexpensively. You can make assumptions, but at the end of the day website users click on what they want, not what you want. And if they can’t find it on your site they will click away to your competition.
4. Writing Tone
Since your company’s website is an online extension of your company’s brand and personality, the tone of voice in all website copywriting should match your company’s other marketing collateral. However, most users are turned off by “marketing speak”, so the attitude conveyed in your site copy should speak directly to their needs without being too “salesy”. Likewise, all pages should have a consistent tone of voice, so if you have different writers make sure they are aware of your messaging standards.
5. Readability
Finally, improving overall readability can greatly improve your website’s credibility. Test your website on a variety of different browsers and make sure all typography is legible. Even better, get a second set of eyes to proofread and test every piece of content on your website. Easy-to-fix things like typos, broken links and grammatical errors can damage your site’s reputation in the marketplace. Don’t let this happen to your website. Spend the extra effort to make sure the final product is the best it can be.
*B.J. Fogg, Ph.D., Cathy Soohoo, David Daniel, “How Do People Evaluate a Web Site’s Credibility?”, 2002.
Topgrading your marketing team
I just finished reading a classic and highly recommended book, Topgrading, by Bradford D. Smart, PhD.
It was full of wonderful advice on how to make sure you hire all “A”s (as opposed to “B”s or “C”s) – in other words, the very best people.
The problem is that Topgrading is a very heavyweight process – 3-hour interviews that start with the candidates’ college days and go through every single job they have ever held with a fine-toothed comb.
I can see where it makes sense to do this for a full-time job. But most companies now outsource at least part of their marketing, and no one – not you and not any marketing freelancer I know - is going to have the patience to do this for a short-term gig.
Yet choosing the right person is important – you need the best freelancers just as much as you need the best full-time staff.
And I love the approach he takes to doing the interviews. Read more
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