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PROMO No-Mo’; So-Med Instead

Have you ever tried to figure out how much it really costs to buy leads for new business clients sent to you by lead generation sites? Have you been really confused about all the tied package deals requiring you to buy websites (for an initial and then monthly fee) and professional pages (for another initial and then monthly fee) and then you can get leads (for each a per-lead price with scalable flow or a fixed monthly price with an undefined flow or for throwing all the money you have in your checking account into the cloud and whatever comes back to you in leads you can keep)? Yeah, me, too.

Regardless of what type of business you have, almost any business type has two, three, or ten or more industry-specific (legal, medical, automotive repair, plumber, HVAC or whatever) websites that will:

  • sell you a professional profile on their industry-specific site, where people looking for professionals like you can find you and get details about you and ask you to bid on their jobs
  • sell you a website that you can link to from that professional profile,
  • sell you warm leads from their industry-specific website and
  • sell you some paid search services to put your ads at or near the top of search engine results pages for the right amount of money used to buy the right collection of keywords.

I have a real smart son-in-law who has worked for several such websites after graduating with a Bachelors degree in marketing with a specialty of Internet marketing. I’m embarrassed to tell him how much I don’t know about this stuff. So, I asked a bunch of his colleagues who work in my primary workspace, practicing law, to try to explain what they would love to sell me.

For example, I called my rep Scott English at Martindale-Nolo. He explained they have a 3-pronged approach to Internet advertising. First, they have their Lawyers.com and Martindale.com and Nolo.com websites where you can (and, if you want to get a deal on their websites and search services, you must) purchase their full and complete professional profiles. Martindale-Nolo will sell you a profile on those pages so people can find you when they search those sites for help by topic and location.

Second, Martindale-Nolo will also provide you with a professional website, if you don’t have a top notch website already. These websites are mobile responsive and search engine optimized.

Third, M-N will sell you warm leads when people search for lawyers on M-N’s topic-specific (DivorceNet.com, etc.) legal information and professional pages.

Now, try to follow the pricing. My main rep, Scott, could only price the first two items. We had to get a ringer, Dennis Melendez, from Martindale-Nolo.com to price the leads for us.

Having a Lawyers.com professional page by itself costs $250 a month. Having a M-N website costs $100. But, if you buy them together, you can get them for $200 a month. Of course, that combo deal expired this coming Friday (no matter which day of the year you are talking to them).

Then, if you want to add getting the warm leads, it depends on your geographic area and practice area, because the pricing for leads varies by demand. For example, divorce leads in Baltimore, Maryland currently go for $26 per lead. You have to agree to spend at least $500 per month for a campaign. They will bill your leads against your deposit. You get and have to pay for all three kinds of warm leads — the good ones, the bad ones, and the ugly ones. But, if not a lead you receive is not in practice area or geographical area you can request a credit for it.

Now, returning to our previous posts, we are trying to develop $25,000 work of business using a $2,500 per month budget. We are paying $200 for a professional page and a website and paying 500 for 19 warm leads. Assuming a 50% closure rate. We are getting 9-10 cases of people who want our $500 “no kids, no property, nothing to fight about, uncontested, easy, inexpensive divorce” uncontested divorce. $700 results in $5,000 worth of business.

Granted, if we took all types of divorce cases, including our “less easy, more expensive”  divorces and the occassional “knock-down/drag-out” divorce then we would be able to get on average $2,500 per divorce or about $25,000 worth of business. This would be a better return on investment, but we don’t want to work that hard. We just want easy, inexpensive divorces. Maybe we can get cheaper leads for the no-contest cases.

Come back for the next post and see.

[reminder]For those of you who have different types of business, what are your similar figures for professional listings, websites, and lead generation farms?[/reminder]

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Finding Customers for Pennies on the Dollar Instead of a Dime

Picture of cornucopiaHave you ever thought it would be so great simply to pay one media outlet all your monthly branding, marketing, and advertising budget and be able to get all the leads you could service each month? Yeah, me, too. I’ve both had dreams and lived through nightmares like that. In a prior post, we saw how you could end up spending $2,500 a month for warm PPL (pay per lead) Internet leads and come up short hitting your $25,000 per month revenue goal. So, how can you get more business walking in your door for less, or, better still, almost nothing at all?

First, let’s review all the various ideas that may populate your BMA plan. We saw them a few posts ago. They are:

  • Advertising
  • Alumni programs
  • Attendance at industry, trade or professional association meetings
  • Blog
  • Charitable contributions
  • Client entertainment and gifts
  • Club dues and expenses (e.g., for whatever clubs allow interacting with targeted prospects)
  • Collateral materials
  • Continuing education seminars
  • CRM system or client database
  • Digital marketing
  • Directory listings
  • Events and seminars
  • Graphic design and branding costs
  • Internet directory referral fees
  • Mailings and communications (e.g., newsletters, invitations, announcements, alerts and holiday cards)
  • Marketing-related training
  • Market research and client surveys
  • Marketing staff professional development
  • Memberships in industry, trade or professional organizations
  • Networking activities (e.g., dues, membership, and travel)
  • Proposals and pitches
  • Public and media relations
  • Retreats
  • Social marketing
  • Tickets and sponsorships
  • Web site design and maintenance

Note that “Internet directory referral fees,” which are the”professional referral online marketing organization” (PROMO) services we’ve discussed paying $25 per lead, are almost in the middle of this alphabetical list. This is probably where such things belong in a living, successful BMA plan. There are a lot of things you must invest in before paying PROMO services and there are also still a lot of things you should invest in after resorting to PROMO services.

Here are some of the must do’s you must do before investing in PROMO referral services:

  • You must choose a “result-oriented” customer value proposition to serve as the anchor of your branding, marketing, and advertising plan.
  • You must create a good tagline.
  • You must create, print, and carry plenty of copies of a nice traditional size business card, a more memorable quarter-sheet “ten-second” service card, and a trifold “elevator speech” brochure.You must create and claim your Internet address.
  • You must invest resources in a good, in contradistinction to a “bad” or a “killer,” reader-device-responsive, website. We have talked and will continue to talk about what makes a website “good.”
  • You must claim and optimize your social media accounts, your industry web aggregators’ accounts, and local marketing aggregators’ directory identities.
  • You must relate (i.e. be social) with other people in as many social media spaces your time budget will allow and convince them to follow your blog.
  • You must blog with relevant content that is supplemented, persistently and consistently, at least weekly, but preferably more often.
  • You must create a valuable lead magnet to give prospects in return for them giving you their email address.
  • You must convince people viewing your site (for the first time, hopefully) to let you continue to send them your new blog posts every time you send one.
  • You must create and implement an e-mail drip marketing program including both content and a platform through which to send it.
  • You must invest in and use an effective and efficient customer relationship management program that ties your prospect management into your client management aspects.
  • You must network in person and by email with current clients.
  • You must network around “pools” of prospects and people who can refer you prospects.
  • You must create and implement a referral recognition and thank-you program including a shout out in your blog and at mailing them a handwritten note containing at least a $5 Starbucks card. The size of the gift is not nearly as important as the handwritten note and the fact you personally took the time to say thank you in a demonstrative way.

Contrary to conventional thinking that everyone searches for whatever they want on the Internet, word of mouth still generates a lot of business for small business owners. It also costs you pennies on the dollar vs. pay-per-click or pay-per-lead.

If you do all of these things effectively, efficiently, consistently, and persistently, then you may well escape the need for long-term dependence on PROMO leads.

Nonetheless, come back next post and we will take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of PROMO leads. Spoiler alert! One of my main complaints about PROMO leads and other PPL and PPC digital advertising is PROMO leads only work what little they do only as long as you continue paying the PROMO website owners to send them to you.

[reminder]What’s your experience with PROMO lead generators?[/reminder]

 

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Remember to Plan with the End in Mind

Have you ever believed you had to have a marketing plan that would find every prospect and convert every one of them into a junkie for whatever it was you are selling? And then you over did both the planning and investment and ended up with more business you could handle and had to either expand your capacity of refer your prospects to colleagues. Yeah, me, too. Hurts, doesn’t it.

Business planning — and the branding, marketing, and advertising (BMA) planning that goes in it — is not about getting all the business. It’s about get just the right flow of business to effectively and efficiently hit your volume target so you can deliver products or services ahead of schedule, under budget, and right the first time around and make the amount of income you want, need, and desire to live the life you want, need, and desire.

Prime examples of this are the Groupon and Living Social failures. Worse than killing themselves, however, these marketing portals killed a lot of their customers using their discount coupon generators as well. All people had to do is pay Groupon and Living Social gobs of money and a great flow of new customers would jump across their thresholds. Oftentimes, however, more people picked up the deal o’ the day and creamed the business owners.

So what’s a small business owner to do? Build and use a multi-focal plan with scalable components you can throttle up and down as needed. Let’s peek at how to do this.

Picking up where we left off a few posts ago … we are a professional-service-oriented business that needs to generate $300,000 a year in revenue with $30,000 of BMA expenses. Assuming even average sales each month, but knowing things are going to ebb and flow with feasts and famine, we need to design a BMA plan that will generate $25,000 in monthly revenue for $2,500 on average per month. How do we do that?

The first thing you need to determine is, “How many new clients do I have to attract each month?” This can be revealed as a simple math problem with monthly revenue being divided by monthly spend per client. If each client spends $500 for a service, then one needs 50 new clients a month. Assuming all things being equal, you can spend $50 per client to successfully sign each client. But, wait, there’s more. What happens if you are only signing half the prospects your BMA plan brings in the top of your sales funnel. Then you can only afford to pay $25 per warm lead from the “professional referral online marketing organization” (PROMO) service for which you’ve signed up.

But, wait, there’s still more. Lead generation promoters are not going to be the one and only, be all, do all, end all of your BMA plan. So you can’t spend your entire monthly marketing budget on referral promo services.

Starting to see how difficult this is going to be to do? There are no easy solutions. The good thing about lead generation services is most of them are easily scalable. You can set a budget and the services will only send you whatever flow of leads you can afford for that budget. In our example, if they were charging you $25 per lead and you were putting 20% of your $2,500 monthly budget, i.e. $500 per month, then you are going to get 20 warm leads from your promoter, which, with a 50% closure rate, will only yield you 10 clients and $5,000 in monthly sales volume.

Nonetheless, if you put all $2,500 of your budget in your promoter program, then you are going to generate $25,000. Great, you’re on target. But, what about when your promoter goes the way of Groupon and Living Social? And, what about creating, hosting, and managing your website? What about doing any other type of BMA work?

In order to work out a full BMA plan, you are going to have to find some components that deliver you prospects for less than $25 per head.

More about that next time.

[reminder]What’s your most effective and efficient business lead generator?[/reminder]

 

 

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30 Ingredients for Your Ragu Marketing Plan

Have you ever wished you could just pay someone 10% of your sales per year to feed you all the clients and/or customers you need to thrive? Yeah, me, too. But wishes like that only come true in our dreams. Real people, running real businesses, for real profits, have to have a real branding, marketing, and advertising plan to get there. And such a real, living BMA plan needs to be robusto, like Ragu Tomato Sauce, meaning, it all has to be in there, Ma.

What all makes a sellable marketing sauce?

Generally, a firm’s marketing budget should always include the following categories:

  • Advertising
  • Alumni programs
  • Attendance at industry, trade or professional association meetings
  • Charitable contributions
  • Client entertainment and gifts
  • Club dues and expenses (e.g., for whatever clubs allow interacting with targeted prospects)
  • Collateral materials
  • Continuing education seminars
  • CRM system or client database
  • Digital marketing
  • Directory listings
  • Events and seminars
  • Graphic design and branding costs
  • Internet directory referral fees
  • Mailings and communications (e.g., newsletters, invitations, announcements, alerts and holiday cards)
  • Marketing-related training
  • Market research and client surveys
  • Marketing staff professional development
  • Memberships in industry, trade or professional organizations
  • Networking activities (e.g., dues, membership, and travel)
  • Proposals and pitches
  • Public and media relations
  • Retreats
  • Social marketing
  • Tickets and sponsorships
  • Web site design and maintenance

While many people say, “The whole world uses the Internet now like the old world used the Yellow Pages then,” and while having a platform-responsive website that looks great on a laptop, a tablet, and a smart cellphone is maximally important, social-digital marketing is still not the only thing to think about in your marketing plan.

Take a moment and think about what all these things are, which of them you are doing, how much of each you are doing, what objective results are you expecting from each of them, and how you are tracking where each of your marketing components are taking you, and how effectively each is getting you where you want to be.

Come back to the next post and we will pick at these things a little more.

[reminder]How much marketing can you do yourself and still run your business and sell and deliver all at the same time?[/reminder]

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See Your Branding, Marketing, and Advertising As Part of Your Living Business Plan

Have you ever found your self up to your belt buckle in alligators and remembered that all you really wanted to do at the time was just drain the swamp? Are you so busy trying to brand, market, and advertise to perfection that you have no time to actually provide goods and services profitably enough to maintain the rest of your life? Yeah, me, too.

Usually, such situations almost always result from failing to keep the end in mind almost all the time. So, let’s at least begin with the end in mind. And that end is money. There are more great quotes about money, than at which one can shake a stick. A good one is best understood by reading the entire lyrics to the song, Money (Makes the World Go Around).

Money is the scorecard of business. Money measures gross earnings, costs of goods sold, net income, general administrative and overhead, gross profits, EBITDA, and owners’ discretionary earnings (or what most people refer to as “income”). Money is the common exchange medium for the property component of life’s precious resources.

So, as you begin fashioning your branding, marketing, and advertising plan you have to first understand your score card target of your living business plan, which is money and more specifically the end product of almost all entrepreneurs, the entrepreneur’s discretionary income. How much “money” will it take to make your cash register of life go “Cha-ching!”?

A little data may help you decide. From 1967 to 2014, U.S. median household income has trended up from $45,000 to $54,000 or so. And most people are satisfied with that status, being fat and happy enough living in the middle.

Lawyers earned an average annual salary of $136,260 in 2015, which is substantially more than any other occupation on U.S. News’ list of Best Social Service Jobs. Paralegals make much less than half that. In 2015, paralegals earned an average salary of $52,390. So let’s assume for the sake of choosing an example, we are fashioning a BMA Business Action Plan for a lawyer wanting to make $136,260 and pay one paralegal $52,390 as part of his 53% expense ratio.

This means our targeted gross income from attorney’s fees collected will be $289,914.89, or so. Let’s assume the lawyer graduated law school in 1990, which means (s)he will have to bill (really, collect; but that’s another thing to worry about) the $300 average hourly rate for lawyers with 25 years of experience. This means the lawyer has to collect for about 966.382966666666667 hours, or so. Let’s round that up by the 5% effective collections rate of law firms to come to the understanding that a lawyer with 25 years of experience wanting to net $136,260 annual income must gross $289,914 a year needs to bill about 1,000 hours per year.

Established, medium and large firms spend about 3-4% of their billings on marketing. Smaller, growing law firms spend about the average of 10% for all small businesses on their marketing. Therefore,, we need to perceive a BMA plan that will generate $300,000 in billings for about $30,000 a year.

$30,000!

Besser! Have you lost your mind?!? No one spends 10% of their gross revenue on branding, marketing, and advertising. Well, many solo practitioners and small (2-5 lawyers) firms do. They may not realize it but they do.

To get a grip on how much it really costs to branding, market, and advertise a small business, in this case a law firm, start off by reading this old article from the ABA Law Practice folks. The data is just a little dated, but the theory is still fairly current and it applies to almost all small businesses providing goods and services.

So, go read the reference article and come back to the next post to begin working with the end in mind, developing a BMA plan that will result in $300,000 a year in annual collections.

[reminder]What’s your BMA plan? And, more importantly, if your BMA plan doesn’t work, then what is your plan B?[/reminder]

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Who Should Brand, Market, and Advertise Your Business?

Have you ever felt completely disintegrated in your branding, marketing, and advertising efforts; wondering what the heck you are doing vs. what you should be doing vs. who else you should get to do it for you vs. how you and them should be doing it; such that you then make the worst choice of all, which is to do nothing but depend on letting God work it out for you? Yeah, me, too. I know how you feel. I’ve often felt that same way. But, let me tell you what I found out.

Having a better business action plan for branding, marketing, and advertising leads to much better preparation and practice of that plan for persistently promoting your practically perfect performance of not only that plan, but also the rest of your business.

Confused? I was, too. But, thank me, I’m doing much better now.

First, you have to understand the difference between branding, marketing, and advertising and how each fit into your branding-marketing-advertising (BMA) plan.

Second, you have to understand the difference between being the entrepreneur, the manager, and the technician in your enterprise and let each of those three people living schizophrenically inside you have their say and do their work respectively on and in your business.

Third, you have to perceive your BMA plan as your entrepreneurial self, manage your BMA plan (naturally) as your manager self, and do the actually work of your BMA plan as your technician self.

Go get a copy of The E-Myth Revisited and E-Myth Mastery by Michael Gerber, zip through them over the weekend, and come back this coming Monday ready to get to work on a Better Business BMA Action Plan.

[reminder]How should you brand, market, and advertise your business?[/reminder]

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Yes! We Can!

Have you ever thought the home page of your big, beautiful, awesome, professionally designed, horribly expensive website is an overgrown thicket of inconsequential stuff that does nothing but vacuum money from your bank account, dust up your clients’ view of your business, and never delivers prospects to your sales funnel? Yeah, me, too. But then I learned to treat my website like a legal brief; the key word there being, “brief.”

Briefs should be short, sweet, well-organized, easily navigable, and to the point. Take a look at these 16 examples of brief website home pages from Hubspot! They are all good. They are all effective. They are all brief. They are short, at least “above the fold.” Uncluttered. They all resonate with their target audience and compellingly state their value proposition and only one value proposition.

And, finally, they all state that “single-topic” value proposition front and center in very few words how you can use whatever they are selling to join a crowd of similarly situated others and make your life better.

None of them talk at length about how many years of experience their company has. None of them discuss everything their owners have ever done and every award they have received. None of them provide you with much, much more information than you can easily digest in 5 seconds. None of them give you more choices to delve deeper in their website than you can pick from one look at the page and pushing on button.

And, being good cultural branders, most of them are doing as many of the steps of cultural branding as they can on one page.

An, they are doing it effectively using good layout, CTA (call to action) placement, whitespace, colors, fonts, and other supporting elements.

These things can be done by yourself with just a little education, training, and experience; just a little bit of coaching from a business advisor with education, training, and experience in website design, implementation, optimization, and usage; and just a little bit of help from a website service company that is geared toward using easy, inexpensive tools to provide business owners with easy, inexpensive websites.

Among all the other things I do, I run a business company consulting company, which is not only affiliated with, but also uses such a website service called hibu.

[reminder]How can we help you create and use your website better?[/reminder]

 

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Can You Culturally Brand With Your Website?

We can help you solve your online cultural marketing puzzle.
We can help you solve your online cultural marketing puzzle.

Don’t you wish you could just get one consistent line of advice about how best to market in the digital world that you could then learn, understand, master, and use like Ron Popiel’s Rotisserie Oven (“Just set it and forget it!”) Yeah, me, too. But, that is not going to happen.

This is the real life of marketing in the modern world. People are fickle. They are fickle about what they want. They are fickle about how they figure out what they want. The majority of them now use online search to do it, but online searchers are  fickle, from moment to moment, about how they find and use your website. And do not even get me started about how Google and the rest of the search engines change their algorithms faster, but with a frequency that seems much more often, than the average couple’s sexual encounter. But I digress.

We are discussing in this series of posts cultural branding and today we are wondering if you can culturally brand on your website. If we look at the websites of the cultural branding examples discussed in Holt’s literature (see the prior posts for details), we see some cultural branding going on in some of them.

The best example is Dove soap. http://Dove.com It’s “Real Beauty” campaign is right there, front and center on the home page. You see that real, but very pleasant looking woman and you want to read what she has to say. Your click the “Read more” and get drawn into the issue, wanting to read more. You click the big circle to find out people’s answers to their survey of “beauty bias.” When you are done, if you are looking for a comforting, caring, friend who “gets you, really gets you” and loves you for all you both are and are not, you can’t wait to go out and pull a bar of the grocery store shelf on aisle 7, halfway down on the right, just are eye level.

For Chipotle, http://chipotle.com, you have to hit the “Food with integrity” button on their top menu, but then you are sucked into Chipotle’s commitment to cook up a better world with every burrito they wrap or bowl they fill. They love their pigs right up to the point they kill them …. But I digress. They even link you out at the bottom of their long culture page to their self-produced comedy series, Farmed and Dangerous. I couldn’t get the first episode to run on my MacBook Pro and gave up after looking at a black box in the middle of my screen for two minutes. Nonetheless, Chipotle has cultural branding there.

Axe, http://www.axe.com/us/en/home.html has much better cultural branding than does Old Spice, https://oldspice.com/en . Compare the two and you will see the obvious differences. Panera, https://www.panerabread.com/en-us/home.html, has it’s 100% clean food success front and center on the first page of its active and interest-grabbing slider.

But, no one, NO ONE, does cultural branding than Starbuck’s, https://www.starbucks.com. Like the others, they make you click their top menu’s “Responsibility” button to find it, but when you do, you are immersed in a multi-media extravaganza about Starbuck’s egalitarian bonding with everyone, while disparaging no one.

There are a ton of examples of both good and bad cultural marketing on websites. But almost all of them are professionally produced with really HUUUUUGE financial budgets behind them. Which brings us to the question driving this post, “Can you culturally brand using your website?”

The answer is definitely, yes, but you have to use your own POWER and proceed only with every resource you have in order to do it. You have to invest at least some of each of your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people to ring the bell with your website. Websites are, however, the major marketing media used by small businesses and you have to leverage your resources to make yours work for you effectively and efficiently.

Come back tomorrow and we will talk more about how.

[reminder]How much of your resources are you investing in online marketing?[/reminder]

 

 

 

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Use All 5 Steps of Cultural Branding to Build a Better Ranking Website

 

Do you want your website to deliver you a super-engaged community that will then buy and use and return to buy and use more of whatever product or service you are selling? Yeah, me, too. Alas, however, before you can enjoy the benefits of such a relationship, you must invest some of all your resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people in online cultural branding to create and sustain that relationship.

Cultural branding did not just spring up last week, month, or even year. One of the early writers about it is Douglas Holt, who wrote How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. Holt, a former Harvard Business School professor who wisely gave up academia for lucre, founded the Cultural Strategy Group. http://culturalbranding.org. His friends at HBS apparently still love him, however, because they published his work another time as a Big Idea section titled Branding in the Age of Social Media. https://hbr.org/2016/03/branding-in-the-age-of-social-media.

Cultural branding requires you to innovatively leapfrog the conventions of your workspace and champion ideologies that are meaningful to your largest sphere of prospective customers. This requires a shift from mindshare branding, through purpose branding, and to cultural branding.

If you’ve ever marketed anything in the past, then you familiar with mindshare branding, whether you call it that or not. Mindshare branding uses psychological associations to convince prospects whatever you are selling will enhance their benefits, emotions, and personality. Purpose branding, mindsharing in the present third millennia, actively espouses the values or ideals prospective customers share.

Cultural branding requires less obvious selling and more subtle, but also more active, support of a targeted pre-existing cultural segment of society’s values and ideals using a strategic combination of traditional media platforms and current social media tools. The targeted subsegment is one that is working on leapfrogging the larger society’s orthodoxy, which creates a cultural opportunity that a marketer can then champion purposefully, truthfully, effectively, and efficiently. Cultural branding requires actually figuring out what culture you want to serve and then actually joining and serving that culture.

Finding, joining, and serving a culture takes # steps:

  • Mapping the cultural orthodoxy
  • Locating the cultural opportunity
  • Targeting the crowdculture
  • Diffusing the new ideology
  • Innovating continually, using cultural flashpoints.

In his HBR article, Holt explained each of these five steps and describes how Chipotle scored 80% over the test of time:

  • Chipotle leapfrogged the cultural orthodoxy that “BigFood’s” commercially processed and refined foods were good for us,;
  • located the cultural opportunity being pushed by Whole Foodies, Trader Joe’s fanatics, Jamie Oliver home-cuisinartists, and others that they wanted healthier food such as organics, non-organic, but unprocessed, and farm-to-table fruits and vegetables;
  • Researched, recognized, and joined the grassroots subculture (crowdculture) advocating these ideas;
  • Diffused the subcultures idea in an entertaining, educational, and enthusing way using some short, animated movies tied in to a good social media presence and traditional media platforms; but
  • Chipotle spun out in the end, however, when it didn’t continue along the culturebranding path by picking inconsequential issues to support, picking consequential issues such as non-GMO foods, but failing to walk that walk, and then suffering through its E.coli problems.

Holt’s article mentions other brands that have exploited subcultural shifts, such as:

  • Axe (men’s grooming products exploiting the “lad” fad)
  • Dove (led the body-positive crowd with a campaign for “real beauty”)
  • Old Spice (used Isaiah Mustafa to let women believe they could improve their men with Old Spice deodorants and colognes).

So, apparently, Holt’s recognized and pointed out for us cultural branding. The question remains, how do we in small business, who cannot afford much in the way of professionally produced videos run first on traditional media and then seeded over social media, use cultural branding most effectively and efficiently to run, grow, and sell our businesses better?

Come back next time and we will discuss more about that.

[reminder]How does your website compare and contrast with the websites of the companies mentioned in Holt’s article discussed in this post? Look and see and then come back read the next post in this series.[/reminder]

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3 Reasons Most Business Websites Suck at Branding

 

Have you ever wondered why that spiffy new, professionally crafted website you spent a few grand developing to show yours is a “serious business” sits all alone on the web, unvisited, unfriended, unshared, untweeted? Yeah, me, too. Rereading a long series of articles written by some “people who ought to know” about marketing in the age of social media may, however, clue us all in on an answer to this dilemma.

  1. Most business websites’ owners are too tight-assed to use the word suck on their websites when it’s really appropriate. People, especially serious business owners, seek to be universally loved and understood as serious, professional, prim, proper, and absolutely neither common, crass, nor, heaven forbid, vulgar. Being so, they for darned sure aren’t willing to let their hair down long enough to really relate with real people who are quite comfortable saying something, like your perfectly coifed website, sucks when it really sucks.
  2. Most business websites’ owners try to create a culture around themselves instead of trying to serve a culture that is coalescing around a topic bordering their businesses’ workspaces. Coca-Cola made this mistake with its Coca-Cola Journey digital magazine. Under Armour apparently didn’t when it took over where Nike left off and began UA’s “I Will What I Want” program by addressing issues of concern to UA workout clothing wearers somewhat more rowdily and randily by letting the public it was seeking lead the discussion
  3. Most business website content is designed to sell instead of enlighten, educate, entertain, and enthuse those viewing the website.

So, what can you do to do better than your dull, boring competitors?

First, do the opposite of these things.

Second, do the opposite of these things in a way that doesn’t overtly look like you are trying to do the opposite of those things.

Third, come back next time and we will learn some details of cultural branding.

[reminder]Would you stay on your website more than three seconds after you first see it?[/reminder]