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Beginner’s Guide to Marketing | Entrepreneurial Tips

By Cindy Ratzlaff April 25, 2012

Entrepreneurs and small business owners usually start with a great idea and a passion for their product. They open their doors, ready for new business and suddenly realize that they’re not only the product creator or service provider, but now they are also their own Chief Marketing Officer and publicity director. These are all too frequently role most new business owners are schooled to skillfully fill. Most new business owners say they wish they’d had a Beginner’s Guide to Marketing tutorial.

The responsibilities of the CMO are simple. Create both a short term strategy to promote the service or product you offer to the ideal customer and a long term strategy to retain that customer and sell them additional products or services.

Attraction and retention are two different strategies. And retention depends on attracting the ideal client in the first place, delivering a product that is a good fit with the client needs and a third element that is a little more ethereal, emotional experience.

Today, let’s talk about easy, low-cost attraction techniques that entrepreneurs can put into practice right away.

What words are your ideal customer typing into Google, right now, to find what you offer? Those are your keywords.

Create a Targeted Digital Footprint

Your digital footprint is the new equivalent to listing your business in the yellow pages. Right now there are more than enough people typing “where can I find your product or service” into Google to keep your company afloat. Your job is to help search engines serve up your links to that motivated customer. How do you do that? By thinking like the customer. What words are your ideal customer typing into Google, right now, to find what you offer? Those are your keywords and you need to be using them in every consumer facing piece of promotion your create including blog posts, videos, press releases, social media bios, advertising and listings in professional business organizations. Write that list of 10-25 keywords or phrases on a piece of paper and tack it to your wall. Use those words strategically and logically in your messaging to help new customers find you.

Generate Referrals

Your best, and least expensive, promotional resource is a happy customer. A happy customer is usually delighted to give you a referral or testimonial if you ask. Make asking a routine part of your sales and delivery cycle. At the end of a sale, service or contract, ask your client or customer if the product or service you provided helped them and if there was anything, at all, that would keep them from recommending you to others. If they have a concern or any unfinished business, this will be your opportunity to resolve that and turn a somewhat satisfied customer into a delighted customer. Once you are sure your customer is happy, ask them if they would be willing to give you an endorsement either in the form of a quote, a survey or a short video testimonial. Ask their permission to use their name, likeness, quote or experience on your website to help other people learn about your business. Then, strategically and methodically, use those customer generated endorsements to demonstrate the value of your product or service.

Sampling

Helping people find you is the first step to convincing people to do business with you. Endorsements by past satisfied customers demonstrate authority in your field, and bonus offers are samples of your work. Letting people try before they buy is one of the lowest cost marketing strategies available to entrepreneurs and small business owners. Some try before you buy bonus offers might be:

A free 15-minute consultation to help customers determine if your services are right for them
A free sample of your work in the form of a white paper, a case study, a sample of a physical product
A group offering such as a free webinar or teleseminar that demonstrates your authority and offering
An e-book with information of value to your ideal customer

By creating a large digital footprint, using your keyword strategy in every consumer facing marketing message, asking for testimonials, demonstrating your value through sampling and consistently delivering high quality products or services, you’ve developed a marketing strategy that becomes a part of your business DNA and helps attract and retain customers and clients.

Expanding Your Brand

By Cindy Ratzlaff November 10, 2011

Brands must evolve and expand or they’ll end up losing market share to competitors. Kodak decided to stick with film. You know how that story ended. But how does a brand create logical brand extensions, products and services that are within their wheelhouse, without stretching their human and financial capital to the breaking point. They frequently take baby steps.

When Oreo wanted to capture more of the cookie market, they created the chocolate Oreo and the double stuffed Oreo. They didn’t create wagons. Many authors, entrepreneurs and small business owners struggle with their portfolio of services or products.

You are a brand. Your products or services are your brand offerings. When you add something new to your offerings, that becomes your brand extension.

Let’s say you are a successful author. You’ve written a great book on marketing. You’ve promoted the book with advertising, personal appearances, traditional media and even social media. Your brand, to the consumer, is “marketing expert.” Now you’re ready to add something new to your services. You might add consulting, coaching, webinars or live trainings. But if you were to add a cookbook to your brand, you’d have a great deal of work to do in order to bring people along with you as you evolve your brand from business to baking. BUT, if cooking is your passion and you’re using cooking as a metaphor for blending, mixing and creating a product, you’d have a brand extension. If the book were about your favorite cookie recipes, you’d need a new branding strategy.

It’s possible for a personal brand to evolve and include a wide variety of products and services. However, adding things far afield from a brand’s original DNA is best done once the brand is mature and the brand leader (YOU) is well established and has a strong and loyal following.

A Self-Evaluation is Your Road Map for Action

For the rest of us, annual evaluation and planning for our emerging brand life cycle is an exercise worth doing. As you plan your growth, ask yourself the following questions:

Where’s the money? What is my most profitable offering right now? In other words, what are people buying from me now? When people are willing to part with their money to purchase your products or services, that’s the simplest and purest market research.
Customer needs: are my current clients or customers asking me for additional information or services I don’t yet provide? If those services or products are within your skill set, this is the proverbial low hanging fruit. Put energy and time into providing your current client base with what they are already asking you to offer.
Next offer: after I’ve delivered my first product or service to a client, and I know they are happy, what do I want to offer them next? This is the beginning of your funnel. Take note of the needs of your clients. See if there are natural additional ways to serve your client base. Repeat this question after every new product or service to create additional offerings.
Brand extension: once you’ve developed a client base the trusts you and is thrilled with what you offer, you can begin to stretch your brand. This is best done in increments. Taking our example, the marketing book author might now write about sales by making the connection in the consumers mind between sales and marketing and letting marketers know they also have to be salespeople, especially if they are entrepreneurs or small business owners. Next, our expert might branch out and claim mind share as a provider of information about product development, distribution and even sourcing. He or she might divide upcoming product offerings into categories that provide deep knowledge in the how-to aspects of each phase of creating new products or services. Then our expert could create speeches, live events, webinars, DVD series, more books and other creative delivery systems for those new products.

Brand development is like story telling. Don’t try to take your reader from “Once Upon a Time,” to “the wicked witch was dead” in two steps. Tell the full story. Lead the consumer through your thinking process by offering logical, helpful, inventive product and service development. And, every step of the way, double check to see that your brand development is ringing true with your customer base. Brand storytelling is marketing. Your ideal reader or client isn’t interested in a one sentence story that shouts “buy my product, buy my product.” Your idea consumer wants you to paint a picture or a solution, entertainment or convenience that your product will introduce into their lives. They want to see themselves using the product, reading the book or enjoying your services. Your story should reveal a path from where people are now to where they could go if they do business with you.

When you’re clear about your intentions and you have your marketing story polished, then you can add a brand extension that will resonate with your fan base.

Bill Gates Tops the Scrabble Leader Board | Facebook adds Subscribe Option to Profiles

By Cindy Ratzlaff September 15, 2011

I admit I have no idea if Bill Gates plays Scrabble on Facebook; yet. But I just might soon enough.

Among the new features being rolled out this week from Facebook are the enhanced friends lists options which many feel was a response to Google Plus Circles, and the introduction of a Subscribe button with multiple implications and applications.

The subscribe button is, by far, the most radical of the changes and for the first time, allows people who are not your friends to see your personal profile updates if you enable the subscribe button. So, Guy Kawasaki or Pete Cashmore haven’t accepted your friend request. Bill Gates is ignoring your pokes and messages. You can now subscribe to their personal profile posts if they decide to enable Facebook’s new Subscribe button. Why should you or your brand care? You should care because Facebook has just opened up an interesting option for celebrities, authors, entrepreneurs, speakers and other high profile public figures to create great reach for their posts, beyond their friendship circle. However, this comes with some challenges, privacy concerns and the need for those users to understand exactly how this works and what they’ll be sharing.

What does this mean for brands, small businesses and entrepreneurs?

For business people who use their Facebook profile as yet another entry point to their brand, albeit a more casual one, you can now place a subscribe button on your profile. This allows people who aren’t your friends access to those posts you mark as public. This will be useful to celebrities, speakers, authors or other very public Facebook users who have reached their 5,000 friend cut-off, but still want to allow new friends to see their posts. If you use your profile strictly for personal communications with family and friends, you’ll want to skip implementing the subscribe button and continue to decline or ignore requests for friend connections with business contacts.

What does this mean for you, the user?

As a user, you can subscribe to the posts of industry leaders, celebrities or political figures who set their personal profiles to allow subscriptions and you can decide what types of posts you want to see. For example, you can hide all posts related to games so that you’ll never know when Lady Gaga hits a new high score on Bejeweled, but you’ll always be notified when she posts a new photo.

Facebook provides more details and the link to add the Subscribe button to your Facebook profile here. The profile owner can choose to be notified when someone subscribes, too. This is one to watch as it evolves in use.

Will you enable the Subscribe button? Why or why not?

How to Price Your Services | Entrepreneur Tips

By Cindy Ratzlaff August 11, 2011

The Entrepreneurial formula goes something like this. Identify a need in the market, conceptualize the product or service to fill that need, price it to move, test the market interest in your product and either go back to the drawing board or launch.

The successful entrepreneur will research, test, price and market according to the results of his or her testing or will go straight to market on a concept that has little or no developmental costs. For example, a business coach who already has a program that he or she does one on one with clients could easily take the program to webinars without much testing by recording it using any number of programs such as Keynote for Mac, Camtasia or ScreenFlow to name a few.

If the entrepreneur has a product or service that delivers value, has identified the likely end user or client and is ready to test the waters, pricing strategies now come into play.

The number one question I get from entrepreneurs is “what should I charge?”

I can’t tell you what to charge for your product or service. That depends on your niche market, the product or service itself, perceived value, quality of delivery, what your competitors charge and many other variables. What I can share with you is that most marketing professionals see a significant drop off in opt-ins or purchases when a consumer is given too many choices. In other words, make your offer simple and increase the chances of consumers taking immediate action and purchasing your product.

There’s a theory that offering more than three choices to people decreases the likelihood of purchase. They become overwhelmed, feel confused and in some cases, suspect that they’ll make the wrong choice and not get the best deal. Here’s the pricing formula I see most often in researching internet marketing guru sites. We’ll use consulting services for our example.

The A, B, and C Concept for Consultants

Package A: This package offers people the chance to consult with you for your highest hourly rate and for the lowest commitment. For example: Two sixty-minute calls per month for $500 with a one month commitment required. In the Package A scenario, people can commit to just one month and pay you $500 to “sample” your services and if your consulting proves valuable, you can convert them to a longer term package. In this scenario, it’s essential that the consultant bring their A game to Package A, and deliver such value and solution based advice that the client can’t image themselves without your assistance going forward. In our example, Package A works out to $250 per hour for a total client commitment of $500.

Package B: This package offers the best value and is the one you really want people to choose because you know that you can make a bigger difference in your client’s business or life if you have more time to do so. So you make it significantly more desirable financially to choose Package B, BUT you require the client to commit to a longer package and thus a larger financial investment. For example: Two sixty-minute calls each month for a three month period would be priced at a discounted $225 per call. Clients save $25 per hour by committing to a three-month package. Package B offers the client a total of 6 consultations at $225 each for contractual agreement of $1,350 and a savings of $150 over your standard hourly consulting fee.

Package C: This package is your high-end offer and requires the longest commitment but gives the highest value. Here you are rewarding clients who are willing to invest in intensive committed work with you by giving them the steepest discount BUT making them commit to the highest out of pocket cost. If clients choose this package, they’ll be saving $3,000 over your regularly hourly consulting rate. This package would offer one 60-minute call per week for a total of three months or 12 calls at $200 for $2,400.

The thinking behind these package strategies is that the clients who choose Package A are exploring. The clients who choose Package B want to invest in their business but are cautious and careful and want experiential proof that you can deliver what they need. The clients who choose Package C are ready to move forward in their business, believe you are the one who can help them and want to take advantage of the maximum financial discount you’re offering.

Whatever package they choose, your job there is to over deliver to the point that they feel they truly desire to have more of your time and they’ll contract for more or if their needs have been met, they’ll give you a great reference you can use to attract other clients.

At the end of any Package contract, always ask the client if their needs were met. If not, work to rectify that. If so, ask if they will give you a testimonial quote that you can use on your website. Most people will say yes. Then you’ll be promoting your services with positive, real life case study quotes.

Social Bookmarking and Blog Comment Strategy | Brand Marketing

By Cindy Ratzlaff June 22, 2011

Social media etiquette aside, there are benefits for all of us in social media bookmarking and blog commenting strategies.

First, when you share valuable information through social bookmarking, you position yourself as a resource to your online community. You train your potential customers to follow you to stay up to date and in the know on advances, news and strategies in their fields of interest.

Social sharing creates social influence for you and the original content creator.

When you comment on a blog post, and, this is important–add to the conversation by contributing additional resources, original thoughts or insights–you also position yourself as an individual or brand highly engaged in your field of expertise. The more interesting your comments are, the more likely people will follow your digital footprint back to your home base and subscribe, follow, friend or bookmark you.

Share to Position Yourself as a Leader

When you read a blog post you like from a writer whose work you value or respect, leave a comment. By doing so, you provide a service. Google and other search engines pay attention to the amount of interaction that takes place on a website and the more interaction, the higher the social authority of that particular blog.

Think about it in this way.

You’re at a business conference where you hear a presentation about a new technology coming out of a brand new start-up.
You go back to your company and tell your colleagues to check out this new start-up because they have some valuable marketing tools that might help you on an upcoming project.
Your firm hires these new innovators for a project which is hugely success because of their new technology.
They grow and continue to innovate and help your whole industry.
You are a hero at your company and you, in turn, consider that original business conference to be your new “must attend” event.
HOWEVER, if you attend the conference but tell no one about what you’ve learned, their start-up fails to thrive and grow for lack of customers and eventually they don’t produce any new ideas or products and perhaps even go under.
Everyone loses; the start-up, your company, and you.

The same thinking applies to blogs. If you find a blogger is consistently providing you with valuable tips and strategies, then commenting is your way of encouraging Google rank them well and ultimately to help others find this blogger. So being a conscientious blog content consumer by subscribing and leaving comments is a way for you to contribute to the ecosystems you inhabit. And, in return, you garner social equity for yourself as an aggregator of useful information, a leader in connecting your fans and followers needs to resources they can use and as an informed player in the marketplace.

Bookmarking Benefits

Social Bookmarking is another responsible way to help spread valuable or entertaining information. In addition to leaving a comment, go to one of the many social bookmarking sites and recommend the blog post to others. Social bookmarks are a way for you to save links to posts you’ve found helpful, and others can subscribe to your bookmarks. By bookmarking a blog, story or news article, you create a home for it where you can easily access it and refer to it again later.

This serves as a visibility strategy for you because you found the post or blog, and now, by bookmarking it, you’re telling other that it’s worth reading. You increase your own social currency as someone who passes on great information and ideas, and you increase the visibility of the original blogger.

It’s Called “Social” Media for a Reason

Social Media is, at it’s heart, people engaging and sharing ideas with one another. So remember to consume information and pass on the tips and strategies that you find most useful. In this way you become a valuable resource to your followers, you become more visible to those you follow and you foster a sharing mentality throughout your network.

Some social bookmarking site you might consider using include:

* Digg
* Delicious
* StumbleUpon
* Reddit

Please let me know if you have a bookmark list so I can consider subscribing. It’s time to create conversations about YOU by creating conversations about others.

8 Free or Low-Cost Twitter Timesaving Tools | Twitter Toolkit

By Cindy Ratzlaff June 7, 2011

UPDATE: Since the writing of this blog, Twitter has changed it’s policy on third party auto-follow apps. So Tool #3 below is no longer recommended for auto-following.

Twitter continues to help entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 companies alike increase their brand awareness, exponentially expand their marketing message reach and create more a sense of relationship between customer or client and brand or product.

Many still fear that Twitter is a time rabbit hole and that building a large following on Twitter will unleash a time commitment they can’t accommodate.

Here are eight timesaving tools to help any sized business or individual entrepreneur find, follow, engage or manage their time on Twitter for productive results.

Twellow: This site is the Yellow Pages of Twitter. This free site allows you to register your Twitter account under three different keywords such as marketing, branding, social media or whatever keywords a potential client might enter to find your business. Listing your Twitter account here will help others to find you when searching for the service or product you provide. Therefore, leads or followers coming from Twellow are more likely than average to be seeking what you have to offer. It’s fast and easy to register and worth your time. Additionally, if you use Twellow while logged into your Twitter account and Twellow, you can search, find and follow others directly from the platform.
Twitter App for Facebook: The Twitter stream is a fast moving conversation and therefore, your tweets once out of sight are out of mind. Making any content you create do double duty is a good timesaving strategy. Using this app to cause Facebook to auto-post from Facebook to your Twitter account makes your daily Facebook post work harder by also speaking to your Twitter followers. And, the added benefit is the way this app creates a truncated link to bring people back to your Facebook page to read a post that is longer. This is a subtle invitation for Twitter followers interested enough to click the link to continue reading to “like” your Facebook page. Again, always ask your content to work in multiple ways.
SocialToo: Auto follow everyone who follows you. I’m a believer in auto following everyone who follows me on Twitter. It’s an easy way to build your following and allows people who find you to DM or Direct Message you on Twitter. I’ve been interviewed by national newspapers and contacted by future clients this way and had I not employed a policy of auto following, they would not have been able to reach me as easily and quickly. I upgraded from a free account at SocialToo to a one-time $10 fee to use their set it and forget it auto follow tool. I love this feature and cannot recommend it enough.
Hootsuite: In my opinion, Hootsuite is one of the best social media dashboards for managing Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin accounts at a glance and pre-scheduling tweets. I use it regularly manage 10 or more Twitter accounts alone, using Hootsuite and their newly enhanced metrics are terrific for creating client reports and for insight into which marketing messages are working and which are falling on deaf ears and may need tweaking.
Tweetbeep: Google for Twitter. Set alerts for your keywords, your business name and your competitors to keep yourself in the loop and to find good information to tweet to your followers.
Tweepi: This handy site allows you to weed out the accounts that don’t follow you back, to reciprocate those that follow you first and to clean out inactive accounts from your Twitter tribe. A free version is suitable for smaller accounts and a paid version adds significantly more functionality for larger accounts or agencies.
Tweetchat: Follow hashtag conversations in real time without distractions. By doing so, you can quickly and easily find people talking about keywords and topics that interest you or your potential customer. Use hashtag conversations to bring yourself and your brand to the attention of others by participating in interesting, on-point twitter conversations.
Timely: Analyze your Twitter patterns and get recommendations on times of day when your followers are most likely see, read and respond to your posts.

What other tools are in your Twitter toolkit? If you have tools and strategies for maximizing your time on Twitter, I’d love to hear about them. Let’s share with one another.

Low-Cost Digital Marketing Tools for Authors and Publishers

By Cindy Ratzlaff May 25, 2011

Traditional marketing and publicity opportunities for books are rapidly becoming scarce as Oprah exits network television and national morning shows more regularly use in-house correspondents instead of author experts. This means authors and publishers need to restock their marketing tool box.

Using digital marketing tools can help authors and publishers by-pass the network television gatekeeper and take book messages directly to the reader. Digital tools help authors connect with potential readers wherever they spend time online, be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs or search engines. And, it is essential to remember that nearly half of all web users are accessing the web throughout the day via their mobile devices so creating digital content that plays nicely in mobile formats is key.

I recently spoke on the topic of digital tool kits at BookExpo America 2011 on the Digital Marketing Panel with Sally Dedecker, Fauzia Burke and Kathleen Schmidt. The panel consensus was that authors and publishers need to consider utilizing a wide variety of digital strategies to reach new readers. You can view my powerpoint presentation here. But many digital tools are expensive to create and not every author or publisher has the budget to develop and implement the more complicated and costly digital strategies used by major brands.

Here’s a list of my favorite low-cost digital tools authors and publishers can their book campaigns.

Blogsite or Website with a blog

This is the author’s home base. Readers should be able to read more about the author, find links to the current and previous works of the author, view a personal appearance schedule and read the author’s blog. Readers should also be able to sign up for a continued relationship with the author, perhaps through a newsletter or to receive a sample chapter of a new book. Whatever the offer, the author needs to capture the e-mail addresses of people who express an interest in hearing from them. Authors can create a free blog using WordPress or Blogger and an e-mail management system like MailChimp is free until the author has attracted 2,000 fans. MailChimp automatically generates the HTML code needed for an Opt-in box, which the author can place on his or her blog. By working with the publisher to offer a sample chapter as a digital download, authors can offer a sneak peek for new books for fans who sign up for the mailing list.

Social Media

Social media amplifies the authors website and blog messages and creates a connection to help readers feel as though they’re involved in the author’s world. Authors can share tour information, preview books, give fans special content such as original stories on their website or blog and spread the word via social media. It’s easier and faster to amass a large following on Twitter and Facebook than to acquire a large subscription base on a website because millions of people are already gathered on social media sites. Go to where the readers are already gathered. Bring the author’s message to those readers instead of waiting for them to stumble upon that message on a website. It’s free to sign up for accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. There is no cost to use them. However, investing a few hundred dollars in design and custom tabs will allow authors to sell books directly from their Facebook Fan page, offer that sneak peek free chapter through an opt in box right from Facebook, create the look and feel of their own television channel on YouTube and give readers a sense of their personality on Twitter. For under $500, each of the author’s social media sites can be design to promote the others and ultimately to drive fans back to the author’s blog or home base.

Opt in

The theme for an author’s digital tool kit is “make it easy for the reader to find, follow, friend and like you.” By developing an e-mail database of readers who have expressed an interest in what an author writes, authors and publishers will be able to easily and efficiently push updates and marketing messages to potential book buyers who have already identified themselves as being interested. This permission based digital marketing is cost effective and can have a higher ROI than nearly any other book marketing. Adding an Opt in box and an enticing sign up offer on both the author website and their Facebook Fan page is an easy, inexpensive digital marketing strategy.

Video

We’re living in a social world where Facebook is the Wal-Mart of digital platforms. With nearly 700 million users now conditioned to expect to see a face attached to every brand, authors who use video effectively will have a competitive advantage in reaching readers. Readers like seeing and hearing from the artists they admire. In the past, meeting a favorite author or even a new author, was relegated to book signings and perhaps major events. Now authors can create short home videos and talk directly to their potential readers, sharing their tour experiences, their creative process and even concepts from their books. Readers enjoy authors who share a bit of their personality and their time by creating short video messages. This, too, is an easy and inexpensive digital marketing concept.

Digital Assets

Authors can now create digital badges, original digital content like blogs or articles, downloadable author photos and bios, digital press releases, quizzes, games and contests. All of these digital assets can be used to create visibility for the author and his or her books online. The more interesting and compelling the digital assets are, the more likely they will be referenced, shared and valued by potential readers. Creating 5-10 original essays or blog posts that can be used as guest blogs on sites visited by an author’s ideal reader is a free way to use these digital assets to promote an author’s books. The topic of the posts could be related to the topic of the new book and the author by-line can reference his or her latest work. By providing desirable content to other websites, the author extends his or her own visibility and attracts new readers. Sharing charts, graphs, photos, videos, quizzes or other interesting and relevant content on these high traffic websites is another strategic use of an author’s digital assets. Think about what digital assets you can create to support the launch of your books and prepare those assets so they’re ready and available at launch time.

Online Advertising

Facebook advertising campaigns can fit any budget. Authors and publishers can set a daily or a lifetime cap to the dollar amount of the campaign. If an author already has several thousand fans, Facebook’s sponsored stories ads display an image of the author’s fan page to friends of that author’s fans with a subtle visual that implies “Your friends like this page. You should too.” Authors and publishers can try different types of ads, different images and different creative messages until they find one that drives new fans to press “like.” Facebook ads can also be created to redirect Facebook users to the author’s blog or website. Again, even a budget of $100 to $200 can have an impact, not just in new fans or readers, but in author and book visibility. Hundreds of thousands of impressions can be achieved for a very modest budget. This is a digital marketing strategy that is often overlooked because publishers and authors think advertising is expensive or that it’s difficult to measure the ROI. With Facebook advertising, daily metrics will tell the tale of these ad campaign affects.

These are just a few of the digital marketing strategies authors and publishers can implement for little or no monetary outlay. Are you using digital marketing strategies effectively? We’d love to hear your ideas and success stories.

Social Media Marketing Tools and Tactics | The Virtuous Circle

By Cindy Ratzlaff April 29, 2011

Using a variety of social media marketing tools and tactics strategically, even businesses on a budget can dramatically increase online visibility and search engine ranking.
Small businesses and entrepreneurs have heard the drums, heeded the call and jumped on the Facebook bandwagon, setting up a fan page for their businesses and even dipping their toes into the Twitter pool. But many are struggling to build a following and beginning to wonder about the R.O.I. of their time in using this social media platform.

The virtuous marketing circle engages multiple learning styles to reach more potential clients and customers.

Although Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites are free, the valuable resource of one’s time is required to actively engage, update and promote a brand message. And, time is expensive. Making the content business create work harder and across multiple platforms is a good way to produce a virtuous marketing circle and increase the ROI of content creation. This tactic can help users create a wider circle of influence by spreading their brand message to an exponentially larger audience; reaching consumers wherever they spend the majority of their time online.

Below is an example of a virtuous marketing circle. The small business owner creates the circle in the follow way.

1. A blog post on his or her blogsite or website.

2. Using a Facebook application such as Notes or Networked Blogs, our business owner automatically pulls that blog post onto his Facebook Fan page, which represents his business. Having set his application controls once, he never thinks about this again. His page is automatically updated with his new blog post each and every time he posts.

3. The title and a link back to our business owner’s Facebook Page is automatically posted to her Twitter account, moments after it hits her Facebook page because she has set up an application called the Facebook Twitter App. So now that single blog post has now been seen on three different platforms and potentially by three different audiences with some minor overlap.

4. Once or twice a month, our business owner chooses a particularly informative blog post and posts it to an e-zine articles site that accepts and syndicates articles with valuable information. Articles on e-zine sites can be picked up by other publications or blogs and helps our business owner reach a new audience with content he or she has already created. Additionally, Google and other search engines will index the articles which helps bring our business owner and brand higher up the search engine rankings.

5. Occasionally our business owner chooses one of his or her blog posts and records it as a podcast, saves it as an MP3, posts it to a Podcast site, itunes and perhaps to a special Podcast tab on the original website. Producing the same messages in multiple formats helps engage different learning styles in potential customers.

6. Just as our business owner was able to rework the original blog into a podcast, so she does so again, in a short how-to video about a particularly post. This video is posted to YouTube, then brought into Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and again, back to the original blog.

With the virtuous marketing circle, one blog post reaches six or seven unique readerships and our business owner has created mutiple touchpoints from which to engage with clients, exponentially increasing the chances of being seen and heard. The original content he or she created has now been broadcast throughout the virtuous marketing circle.

How do you reuse, rework, re-introduce your ideas and messages to reach a wider crowd. Let’s share ideas.

FOCUS | How to Create Powerful Marketing Messages

By Cindy Ratzlaff April 19, 2011

When I consult with entrepreneurs, publishers or major corporations, I start by asking them to share their F.O.C.U.S with me. At first, most say “creating wealth,” “making money,” or “selling more products.”

Can you put your core offering into one compelling sentence?

I always ask them, for the purpose of achieving those goals, to shift their focus from the end result to the first challenge; clearly stating their unique value to a potential customer. This “why to buy” focus helps businesses center their marketing, branding and public relations messages around the most important point of all—their offering.

F.O.C.U.S stands for “Find Our Core Unique Service.” Figuring this out helps companies address one of the four key elements of branding; variation. Asking the tough questions, doing the research and creating clear, concise communications will save entrepreneurs and even bigger companies time, money and frustration.

Some questions to ask to help define the unique service or selling proposition are:

How is this service or product different from all others in the competitive set?

Less expensive, more detailed, easier to use, more conveniently located?

Does the personality of this business or service give it something special?

Is the business or service provider more highly qualified, more experienced, personally enriched by the product usage?

Why would someone choose this product or service from all other choices available?

Better customer service and support, first to market, more stylish packaging, more rave reviews, higher perceived value?

Try to put your core offering into one compelling sentence. This exercise will tell you if you’ve nailed your F.O.C.U.S. I invite you to post your F.O.C.U.S. statement here and I’ll give you my opinion on whether or not your statement conveys your F.O.C.U.S. to me. Go.

4 Rules Every Social Media Marketer Can Learn from Improv

By Cindy Ratzlaff April 11, 2011

Many of you know I began my career as an improvisational actress. I’ve shared the stage with or taught classes to Bruce Willis, Kathy Kinney, John Leguizamo, radio and voice over personality Buzz Brainard, directors Bob Koherr and Peggy Rajski and even casting legend, David Rubin. What most people don’t know is that improvisation looks like free form conversational style theater, but in fact, it’s a structured technique that employs just four clear, crisp rules. The rules of improvisation are surprisingly similar to those for using social media platforms as a marketing vehicle.

Everything I know about Social Media Marketing, I learned in improv.

The four rules of improv can be summarized as:

who and what
when and where
yes, and
don’t deny

Who and What

Who you are to one another and what you’re doing are essential elements to establishing an interesting improvisational scene. They’re also key to establishing trust and social proof when engaging with others online. Establishing who you are and what you offer helps you attract potential clients who may be interested in your products or services. Demonstrate your expertise and provide social proof through actively sharing advise or strategies in your field. An improv actor might start a scene by saying, “Hello Nanny, it’s been a long semester and I’m delighted to see you again. Let me help you with those toys.” The audience will instantly know the relationship, and what they are doing. An entrepreneur might say, “When Forbes called me a “must follow” on Twitter, I realized I needed to share my techniques with others. My new webinar starts on Friday.”

When and Where

The when and where of an improv scene helps give the players clues as to how to communicate during the scene. The object of establishing a strong when and where is to help the players and the audience envision a scene with no props. On social media platforms, we’re using very few props other that words and the occasional video, photo or audio file. We need to establish help the consumer visualize our brand, our offering, our service. The actor in our scene above might say, “My playroom looks the same as it did when I was five. Even though I’m almost grown, I still have trouble sharing these toys with my little sister, Nanny.” Now the audience has a strong sense of the scene, the players and way they’ll interact with one another. To establish a clear when and where, the entrepreneur in our scenario above might say, “I’m thrilled to be offering this webinar, free of charge, this week right on my Facebook page, using LiveStream. Join me!”

Yes, And

In improvisation, a sacred rule is to listen to your fellow actor speak, then silently say to yourself, “Yes, and…” then add information. If one actor says, “I love your beautiful dress,” and the next actor says “I think I’ll walk the dog,” the audience and the actors suddenly seem confused. But if the answer to the first statement is “Why thank you. I bought it with the money you generously sent me in my birthday card, ” now we have a scene and a deeper relationship between the two characters. So our entrepreneur above needs to listen to his or her fans and followers to see how they responds to the LiveStream news, silently say “yes, and” and add more information. Example: “Will the event be recorded so I can listen later if I miss it live?” (Yes, and) “It will be recorded, Joyce, and I’ll be answering questions all week on my Facebook fan page.”

Don’t Deny
Denying someone’s statement in improv is tricky and can bring a scene to a halt, causing. If the first actor says, “What a beautiful, sunny day,” and the second actor says “No it’s not, it’s raining,” the next several moments will be a battle of wills to see who defines the scene, creating chaos onstage. In our entrepreneurial world, think about keeping the flow of ideas and questions coming and encouraging conversation to build relationships. Our entrepreneur above would be struggling to keep clients if he kept denying their needs or the way they receive his products. How would their future relationship go if our entrepreneur said, “You didn’t do the things I recommended, so you can’t expect the results I promised.” While that might be true, a more productive way to move this relationship forward might be, “I understand that you’re not ready to move forward on my original list of suggestions. Let me come back to you with some new ideas to see if we can overcome your concerns and still produce the result you’re hoping for.”

Every entrepreneur is really an improvisational artist. He or she works with new clients or customers and new situations all the time. Entrepreneurs need to be quick on their feet, flexible in their ideas and creative in their leadership. Everything I know about social media marketing, I learned from improv. All the web is a social stage, and remembering the four rules of improv can improve our social interactions.

How are you employing the rules of improv in your business? I’d love to hear ways in which you’ve set the scene, communicated clearly, turned a negative into a positive and added information. If you enjoyed this post, I’d very much appreciate it if you’d leave a comment.