1.      You don’t need business cards anymore. Direct folk to your social media page instead.

Imagine you’re at a networking event and you ask for a person’s business card only to be greeted with this statement. You might be a bit surprised but take their advice at face value. But by the time you’ve returned to your office the chances are you’ll have forgotten their details because you don’t have anything tangible to remind you. Business cards still have a part to play in promoting you and your business. They’re fantastic when attached by a paper clip to your direct mail letters and they are an almost universally recognised currency. There are so many great designs today that you can promote your services, provide your contact details and include your social media addresses on the one card.

2.     No one reads direct-mail any more.

If this was the case, I think that most of my clients would shut up shop. It’s true, people don’t welcome junk mail – cheap flyers and poorly worded letters printed on tatty paper or catalogues mailed out on an indiscriminate basis with no thought to the profile of the recipient and their needs. But targeted direct mail, with a robust benefit driven message, an attractive and appropriate presentation and maybe an additional item to make it ‘lumpy’ is definitely holding its own and delivering results for all types of businesses – even web designers and search engine optimisation companies.

3.     Publishing a book means that you are an expert in your field.

The availability and increasing sophistication of self publishing has given many authors, me included, the ability to share our expertise for a low outlay, and with Amazon welcoming self published authors, publishing a book has never been so easy. But if your book has been written with the main purpose of acting as an extended business card, with little thought given to the quality and integrity of your content and the needs of your readers, you risk doing more damage to your expert status than good.

4.     You can’t sell your services or products on twitter

This is partly true. If all you did on twitter was blast out tweets trying to sell you would get short shrift and your followers would desert you. But a careful blend of useful tweets (sharing your expertise), engaging with your followers, retweeting their tweets and promoting your services is a recipe for building a positive online profile and for creating a demand in your services or products.

Feel free to post your comments of support or disagreement below.

Bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to start the new day.

A few weeks ago I arrived at the Travelodge in Bristol at 10:10 PM after a four-hour journey. Check-in was efficient and within minutes I was in my room. I had requested a quiet room and so I was alarmed to discover that the traffic noise outside my room was so noisy I thought that the window had been left open. It hadn’t. With it being late, I couldn’t face complaining and so decided to turn on the TV to drown out the traffic noise.

The television didn’t work.

I paid a visit to reception and was told there were no quiet rooms available, no batteries and no spare remote controls. Instead I was offered a complimentary evening meal (at 10:30?!) or a  discount on my next stay.

I then discovered that the mattress was so old that the springs were protruding from end to end, with only the thinnest layer of fabric to stop them from breaking out of their confines.

A few days later I received the ubiquitous e-feedback form. I spent 10 minutes completing it, explaining the problems, deciding that an absence of melodrama or thinly veiled expletives were best avoided. I did however in the comments section add “I am curious to know if you will actually pick up the phone and respond to my feedback or ignore it completely.”

I’ve not heard a bean from Travelodge which does suggest their feedback process is a farce.

So what can you learn from this experience?

• If you’re competing on price, you can’t give customers everything and they don’t expect everything. But, you have to be brilliant at the basics and deliver their expectations. I didn’t expect fluffy Egyptian towels and Jo Malone toiletries in the bathroom for £42. But I did expect a quiet room, a comfortable bed and a television that worked.
• When seeking customer feedback, don’t regard it as a ‘going through the motions’ exercise. Respond swiftly to complaints. Unhappy customers enable you to improve your business. They highlight glitches and faults that you may otherwise be oblivious to. Remember, most customers don’t like complaining in person even when on the receiving end of bad service.
• Empower your staff to make decisions in the customer’s favour.
• Double check customer requests before delivering your product or service. A quiet room is just that. Not a room by two lanes of noisy traffic.

And never take your customers for granted or treat them like second-class citizens.

And I suppose you want taps...?

When my in-laws decided to replace their kitchen with a not insignificant budget, they chose to shop local in the belief that they would benefit from an attentive and reliable service and would be supporting a local business. And so, one Saturday morning they paid a visit to three local kitchen designers. Here’s what happened.

Can’t you see I’m busy reading my OK magazine?

At the first showroom, the assistant was reading when they walked in. She did not lift her head from her riveting read. Hell no! Don’t let a hot prospect come between you and what Posh Spice is up to! After 5 minutes of being ignored, my in-laws left with a resolve never to return.

At the next showroom, the manager expressed an interest in quoting for the job, took some details and said he would be in touch.  Which in fairness he was, but only after he had been chased several times. And the quote was poor indeed. One flimsy sheet of A4, missing many of the details that had been discussed.

The company my in-laws eventually settled on delivered a first-class service from the initial conversations through to the finished kitchen in all its granite glory.

Now, what’s so bad about this true tale is that I know that the two dilatory businesses advertise on a regular basis. They pay to bring people like my lovely in-laws through their doors and when they get them, they deliver a service so poor and lacklustre that they don’t convert.

Sadly these two businesses are not unlike some of the small businesses I encounter on my travels. They lament that business is tough, that getting customers is a challenge and that ‘there’s no money out there’ when this is not always the case.  If you’re feeling the pinch, don’t simply point your finger at the external environment, blaming trading conditions on your shortfall.  Look within.

And so they send you an email or leave a message on your phone, post a message on your social networking page.

But what happens if you do not respond to these messages in a timely manner? How is this prospect likely to react? Let’s play out the possible scenarios:

1.     You don’t respond (because you’re too busy).

They are now a little baffled. Did my message register on the answer phone? Perhaps my e-mail got caught in their spam filter. I will leave it a day or so and contact them again.

2.     You still don’t respond (perhaps because it has slipped your mind).

They are now unhappy. Do they want my business or not? Perhaps I should ring instead of email or email instead of ring or send an indignant open message on their twitter or facebook page. I’m going to give them one more try before I throw in the towel.

3.     You don’t respond (well it’s too late now and you feel awkward).

Irritation concedes to anger and your hot prospect decides to tell anyone and everyone in earshot of how you have treated them, or they stay silent and seethe.  But they still have needs that you have not been able to fulfil because you were too preoccupied to get back to them.  So they are now going to buy from one of your competitors and will tell other potential customers of just how unhappy they are with you. This is also great news to any competitor, eager to exploit any chink in your armour.

I am sure you have been in the frustrating position of having money to spend but despite contacting a business several times, your overtures have been ignored. It drives you mad doesn’t it? So, if you have a business and are finding it hard to cope with an influx of hot prospects, don’t hand them to your competitors on a platter.

• Try to follow-up any messages you receive from a prospect on the same or the next day. Find that time, even if it is during the evening, to respond. If you really are too busy to deal with the query at this time, send a lovely ‘holding’ message suggesting a conversation in a few days’ time.

• Be grateful for your hot prospects! Do not take them for granted, treat them like gold.

• Protect your business from the accusation of not wanting business by showing that you really care about everyone that gets in touch.

• If you are unable to deal promptly with new queries, consider bringing in an additional resource. Explore the merits of automation so that your hot prospect experiences an immediate response and their expectations are managed.

But however you do choose to deal with messages from potential customers,  don’t ignore them!

'Let me just consider your price rise for a second ......... '

There comes the day when you realise that your expertise and experience is worth far more than you are currently charging. Or perhaps you’ve absorbed so many increased costs in a bid to remain competitive that your profit margin has diminished to the point where you have to increase your prices to stay in business.

The decision to increase your prices is usually met with anxiety.

How will your existing customers react?

They have become accustomed to paying you a certain amount, have budgeted for your services or products and suddenly they’re faced with paying more.

Here are 4 tried and tested ways you can manage a price increase and hold onto most of your customers.

• Instead of immediately imposing a price increase on customers, let them know you’ll be increasing your prices a little further down the line so it gives them time to adjust to your news. People rarely respond well to negative news being sprung on them.

• If possible, don’t charge the full price increase to your existing customers. Let them know that new customers will face the full increase, and tell them what this will be to reassure them that because of their loyalty they’ll still be getting a preferential rate.

• Let your customers know of the additional things you do, and will continue to do, but don’t charge for. Don’t assume that customers are aware of all of your nice touches.

• Sniff out your competitors’ charges. If you’re still price competitive after an increase you can be confident that if some clients do talk to competitors, they will most likely stay with you.

Of course, no matter how sensitively you handle the news of your price increase, you may still lose some customers especially those for whom price is everything. Accept this. You can’t please everyone!

Perhaps the best advice I can share with you is to charge a fair price in the first place. If you started your business charging a rock bottom price, although it may have suited you at the time in bringing customers to your door, it doesn’t take long for you to  become resentful that you’re delivering so much for so little – and as a knee jerk consequence you hike your prices, alienating many of your customers, surprised at the suddenness of the increase.

So stand in the shoes of your customers and handle the price increase process with care and sensitivity.

Let’s get three things clear from the start:

• a marketing plan is not theory
• a marketing plan does not distract you from selling
• a marketing plan is not just for  big businesses

Your marketing plan is the engine that fuels your sales by providing clarity, and direction. It enables you to develop pin sharp relevant and accurate sales messages that your targeted audience will lap up.

So don’t dive straight into selling without creating your marketing plan. You don’t have to work with a marketer if funds are tight. You do need to be organised and to invest time – 90 minutes at a stretch will do.

Here are the 7 essential steps towards building your marketing plan:

1. Carry out an audit of your marketing activities and marketing communications so far – what you’ve spent, what you’ve gained. Be ruthless. Chop out the activities that have failed miserably. Recycle the old worn out communications that don’t  cast you in a good light.
2. List the improvements you are planning on making to your products and services. What was good last year might not stand up this year and you have to commit to improvement to outsmart competitors and meet changing needs.
3. Review your competitors. Are they smarter than you or vice versa? Either way your customers don’t operate in a vacuum devoid of competitors, neither should you. What can you learn from competitors?
4. Create your positioning statement – the compelling reasons and benefits why your target audiences should buy from you. This is the DNA of your business so if you haven’t recently sat down and audited why you’re so darn good, you risk trotting out tired old statements because you don’t know what to replace them with.
5. Identify the target audiences you want to reach, why you want to reach them and how you can reach them. Had my client done this exercise alone he would have saved an awful lot of money.
6. Decide upon the marketing activities and marketing communications you’re going to harness to promote your business to your target audiences this year.
7. Consider any limitation factors – what’s standing in the way of your marketing plan being implemented? This is a big one. Among the many small businesses I have worked with in the last 10 years, it is the limitation factors, such as lack of time and physical resources, that can scupper the best marketing plan. In order to grow my business and write my books, my husband had to give up his career and join me. If you have to take risks and make bold decisions to advance your business this year, recognise this.

1.  They were unscrupulous with a dodgy twitter strategy! They followed you (and many others too) with the intention that when you followed back, they would immediately unfollow you. Why do they do this? They want to look good, to puff up their ego, to show off to the world that they have many followers but follow very few.

2.  A person followed you on the basis of the content in one tweet you posted. If your subsequent tweets differed completely in their nature and tone from that tweet, they unfollowed you because you didn’t deliver what they were hoping for. Don’t worry about losing these followers. You can’t please everybody!

3.  A person followed you hoping you would follow them back and when you didn’t they unfollowed you.  They were looking for a two way street!

4.  You are not tweeting enough. Most folk on twitter will periodically review the people they are following. If you haven’t tweeted in the last month, some will unfollow you because you’re not active, and therefore you are not providing any reason to continue following you.

5.  You are tweeting too much! Flooding your followers’ timeline with dozens of tweets in the space of several minutes can be irritating. Consider spacing your tweets apart.

6.  You are broadcasting – most of your tweets are just links and information. You have become a one dimensional information centre  and after a while this becomes boring.

7.  You are not responding to the @messages sent to you by a followe, or to your direct messages. If a follower takes the time to send you a personal message, take the time to respond back promptly. Responding after several days is too little too late. Another reason to encourage you to be active on twitter.

8.  You’re using twitter to sell and nothing else. As I have shared in previous blogs, there is nothing wrong in selling your services or products on twitter. But if selling is all you’re doing, you’re missing the point of social media which is to interact, chat, engage and then sell.

9.  You have fallen into the habit of sharing dubious jokes and dodgy humour best left to your close circle of friends.

10.  You have joined the # frenzy, with your tweets comprising of hash tags linked to isolated words. Don’t forget, a human being is on the receiving end of your tweets and a proliferation of # tweets do not make for interesting reading.

11. Your tweets are littered with spelling mistakes or are written in txt speak. You’re rushing each tweet before publishing it. Sadly bt trying to cram too much into those precious 140 characters, you could be creating charmless and unreadable messages.

12. Spend a few minutes contemplating why you unfollow someone on twitter? The chances are that you will be unfollowed for these same reasons too!

If you’re concerned that you’re losing too many followers, review your last 20 tweets against these tips. This could reveal where the problem lies and what you need to do to get your twitter strategy back on track.

One easy-to-measure yardstick that really sorts out the mediocre tweets from the top tweets is how many  are re-tweeted; when one or more of your followers, or indeed non-followers decides that your tweet merits re-tweeting to their followers. If you want your reach and impact to spread on twitter, you need to be tweeting in such a way that one little tweet is carried to hundreds of thousands of people.

Here’s how you can achieve this :

• Become a genuine expert and share useful nuggets of information and expertise. It may take a little while for people to view you as an expert and not just a flash in the pan trying to sell something but once you’ve established a regular pattern of expert tweets, your followers will pick up on them. Many will share these tips with their own  followers. But don’t over saturate. If all you do is share an unrelenting stream of top tips you’ll come across as one dimensional.
• Re-tweet the tweets of followers that you would like to re-tweet your tweets. What you give out, you get back.
• Get into the habit of responding to tweets you enjoy, find useful or just plain amusing. In doing so you are drawing attention to yourself in a positive light so that when your tweets pop-up in a follower’s timeline, they will be much more predisposed to re-tweeting because they already hold you in a favourable light.
• Tweet about something topical that sits within your area of expertise. For example, a cake maker could share an opinion about the Great British Bake Off, a musician about The X Factor, a personal fitness trainer about the Olympics and so on. If the debate is already happening on twitter, the fact that you are sharing your opinion as an expert with a connection to the topic means you are more likely to have these tweets re-tweeted.
• When you promote your latest blog, don’t just share a link with a few bland words. Tell your followers the benefit of reading your blog and re-tweeting it to their followers. “7 ways to build a powerful twitter profile. My latest blog” has more impact than “my latest blog on twitter profiles” The tweet promoting your blog should be the headline to an advert.
• Be controversial but remember there is a fine line between making people respect you and annoying them.
• Include in your tweet the name of a follower that you would just love to re-tweet your message. You can bet your bottom dollar that if there is a positive and obvious connection between your message and your named follower, they will re-tweet your message to their own followers. For example, I am speaking at an event in a few weeks time and the organisers have been sending very nice tweets about the event with my name in the message. How could I not re-tweet that to my followers?
•  Share an inspirational quote or saying, but go one step further than the usual tweets of this nature and share why you like it/how it has helped you.
• Ask a question and make it clear that you really would like as many answers as possible. “What is your number one marketing tip for social media?” Many followers will answer you and others will re-tweet your question to their followers.
• Thank every person that re-tweets your tweets. Twitter is not just one to many, it’s also 1 to 1. A personal message no matter how short goes a long way in building  online rapport.

Do you have any of your own tips on how to get tweets retweeted?

All from just one tweet!

Now, whilst I am far from being a twitter expert, I’ve managed to get some amazing results from twitter; I’ve “met” and connected with hundreds of my readers, sold loads of books and found some great experts and suppliers that I have subsequently worked with and that have spoken at my events – on top of gaining new clients.

So, here are 10 of my personal twitter top tips

1. Make full use of your twitter bio. You’ve got 160 characters to convey just how interesting you are. Keep it updated too.
2. Be present. You can over automate your tweets unwittingly believing that in doing so you’re being ultra efficient. You need to be present on twitter, responding to messages, retweeting good tweets and sharing your expertise. Invest some time every day for twitter. I don’t have a twitter routine because my working days vary dramatically. But I do make sure that I check in three or four times a day. Find your own daily routine so that tweeting does not become a chore.
3. Follow interesting and knowledgeable people. You’ll learn from their expertise. For example, my favourite dispenser of marketing wisdom, Robert Clay @marketingwizdom shares fantastic marketing content and because he has 70,000+ followers, a retweet from Robert is worth its weight in gold.
4. Share your expertise generously but if you want these tweets to be retweeted in full restrict them to 130 characters.
5. Check each tweet before posting it. Tweets full of txt talk and spelling mistakes are to be avoided if you want to build a great reputation with your followers.
6. Be careful what you tweet. Imagine your most valuable client and hot prospect is standing over your shoulder. Will they like what they see?
7. Respond to your @messages promptly, especially when being asked for help.
8. When you retweet a message be extra thoughtful and condense it so that you can add a few words that explain why.
9. If you want someone to follow you, retweet their messages and ensure that  your tweets are interesting enough to make them want to follow you back.
10. You can definitely sell your services on twitter but know when the time comes to stop selling and to start sharing and interacting.

What is your twitter recipe for success?

That brings me to another famous person, Wayne Hemingway. I attended an event several years ago at which Wayne was the keynote speaker. Wayne asked members of the audience to volunteer what they did for a living. The answers given were very specific.

“I write brochures and leaflets for businesses.”

“I develop marketing plans for small businesses.”

“I adapt vehicles for disabled workers.”

Wayne was keen to impress upon the audience that they were so much more than just deliverers of one solitary service. Dig deep and there was more to give.

Are you benefiting from the fact that you too are a multitalented person?

Now whilst there’s absolutely nothing wrong in being a specialist and focusing on one product or service, there are benefits galore from expanding on what you currently offer whilst staying true to your experience and skills.

Having a number of services, and therefore income streams, at your fingertips protects you when times are tough and boosts you when the hard times pass over. It’s something I have bought into lock, stock and barrel with my own business and as a consequence it has grown significantly in the last few years. I don’t just pigeonhole myself as a marketer working with small businesses helping them with their marketing planning. I’ve also developed annual conferences, regular boot camps, telephone marketing mentoring and marketing troubleshooting – just a few of the services I identified a need for and where I knew I had the expertise to deliver.

Stand back from your business. Look at your products and services. Are there new income generating initiatives you can add? Are you really making the most of your expertise and knowledge or are you sitting with a solitary service or product without a plan B?

What you may discover after this exercise is that you have much more in common with Jessica Ennis than you could possibly have imagined.