March, 2012

Advertising / Attracting Customers / Authentic Values / Relationship Marketing / Social Media — No Comments
25
Mar 12

How to Promote through an Authentic Story

As a marketing services provider, I know the benefits of promoting myself and my business, but that doesn’t make it any easier to step out of my comfort zone and actually do it. Culturally in Australia, we do tend to be a teeny bit critical about those who enthusiastically share their awesomeness; but we can learn to authentically self promote through telling a story about what we do, and why we do it and gain the benefits of self promotion.

The most compelling reason to try is that customers are going to be more motivated to buy from people they know, like, and trust. Building trust can begin with sharing the story of your business and the people behind it. The imminent change to Facebook Timeline will provide businesses with an improved platform for authentic story telling.

Telling your authentic story can help both you and your prospective customers by:

  • Demonstrating your values, so you naturally attract customers who relate to you,
  • Explaining why you do what you do, which helps prospective customers understand you and trust you,
  • Sharing your unique persona, enabling customers to understand what you’ll be like to work or deal with,
  • Clearly identifying your ideal customer, encouraging those that don’t fit to look elsewhere and those that do, to make contact.

As business owners, we owe it to ourselves to become better at communicating our story. We are all passionate about our business. We express love for our new project or idea or product.  An authentic story simply links this passion with our unique persona to what we love doing, and a genuine joy becomes evident when we share our story.

Promoting yourself and sharing your story won’t always feel comfortable but to develop and grow, you won’t ever be comfortable. With a bit of practise, you’ll find your story telling skills starting to improve. Given the rapid changes happening with online video and social media, great story tellers will have a seriously big advantage over those that hide behind their computer screens.

If you are shy but have learned how to promote yourself with your story, please share your experiences below. Feel free to give yourself a bit of gratuitous self-promotion at the same time!

About the author:  Teresa Bassham is the owner of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing and educates businesses to think, create, engage and optimise their marketing effort.  She coaches customers in Social Media Strategy and implementation.  If you would like some assistance changing to Timeline for Facebook Pages, please contact her through her website: http://www.zenworkz.com/

Zenworkz Authentic Marketing publishes a weekly blog on small business marketing: http://www.zenworkz.com/blog/

For daily marketing tips and references, connect on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

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Authentic Marketing / Online Marketing / Social Media — No Comments
17
Mar 12

Are you ready for 30th March, 2012?

If you have a Facebook page for your business or a personal page, like it or not, the format will change to Timeline by  March 30th 2012.

Teresa Bassham

The major benefit for a smaller business is that this format moves from a seemingly random flow of information to an opportunity to tell the real story of your business.  And that will be a good thing!  Changes will occur to the Facebook Banner, About, Applications, Milestones, Highlights and Posts.

Milestones, when done well, will dramatically improve the value your page provides to fans and increase their interest in your brand.

Time is running out to make this transition smoothly – in a way that takes your fans on the journey with you and enhances your online reputation.  It’s very important for you to think about and plan this transition and not just deal with when it arrives.  Why?  Because many of the format elements that you know now are changing and with a little bit of work – you can be prepared, so that the transition enhances their experience rather than frustrate fans.

The first important step is to select a Banner or a image based metaphor, that taps into the emotional and cognitive associations you want your fans to relate to your brand.  This banner provides you with the perfect opportunity to create that unique look and emotionally compelling visual that “sells” your business and brand.

The next major change is to Applications tab, which have moved to the top of the page under the banner, right next to “About”.  The first tab is photo’s and is the only tab that can not be moved from this position but all other tab boxes can now be moved in their order of preference.  It’s wise to leave “Likes” on the top line because it does enhance your pages credibility.  This gives you two more tab boxes get creative in your call to action – either  “free stuff”; or subscribe to e-news; or your existing Welcome tab – which will not be lost in the change over.  Importantly, you can no longer direct new fans to this Welcome tab from Facebook, but you can direct them to the tab from your website.

The next important change it to “About”, where you have an opportunity to create a short promotion about your business benefit and your link to your website or other marketing/sales channels.  It needs to 90 characters long including your web link – now’s the time to be crystal clear about your offer and customer benefit.  Note: if you have listed your business category as local, it will default to address and phone number, so you may need to change your category to create your fabulous “About” promotional statement.

Timeline provides you with the opportunity to create “milestones” in your business history and this enhances your authentic story, will dramatically improve content value for fans and gives fans more reasons to keep connecting with your page.  You can tell fans Why and How you started your business, which can be forgotten down the track; but is a compelling reason to support you and your business growth.

There are two other changes to get used to: Highlight and Pin.  Highlight enables you to expand a post to a whole page view which makes it great for posts with video and pictures.  Pin enables you to “pin” a post to the top of your page for seven days, which is great for events, where you want the post to be prominent.

One change that is least liked, is that posts by your fans appear in a box, called “recent posts by others” but you can easily “share” the important posts, so that they will appear more prominently on your timeline.

One last tip, when you are building your new storyline and milestones, be careful of doing it all at once and spamming your fans with the changes.   Most don’t like spamming and you could lose fans.

Have you changed to timeline for pages?  Did you discover any useful tips not covered here – please share below.

About the author:  Teresa Bassham is the owner of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing and educates businesses to think, create, engage and optimise their marketing effort.  She coaches customers in Social Media Strategy and implementation.  If you would like some assistance changing to Timeline for Facebook Pages, please contact her through her website: http://www.zenworkz.com/

Zenworkz Authentic Marketing publishes a weekly blog on small business marketing: http://www.zenworkz.com/blog/

For daily marketing tips and references, connect on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

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Authentic Marketing / Authentic Message Creation / Authentic Values / Branding / Customer Research / Marketing 101 / Marketing Plans — No Comments
11
Mar 12

How to Discover Your Next Brilliant Career!

If you are brilliant, you will be one of only a handful of lucky people in Australia or across the world, who know intuitively what you’re destined for.  For the vast majority of us, we need to take a more thoughtful path – one that requires deep thinking.

Coming up with a new business idea, of course, is the hard part, but I have methods for helping my customers, and it begins with telling the story of their life. The tool I use is a timeline, to help them express their values, experiences, insights, skills and abilities that are unique to them.

Your brilliant idea needs to be uniquely your own, so it makes sense that this journey begins by looking at the events that have shaped your life and made you who you are today.  It may sound weird coming from a Marketer, but to discover your big new idea and what is unique about you, we don’t start with what the market wants from you, because the market only knows what they have seen.  If you want a great example of this – think Steve Jobs and Apple!

To uncover what is unique about YOU, that will help you stand out in the market, you need to turn away from the market. What makes this paradoxical approach work, is that you will be able to identify a customer for any idea you come up with, again – think Apple.

For an aspiring entrepreneur, doing some form of creative exercises to discover your big idea is a quick way to improve your chances of launching a successful business.  Where to start?  Here are three exercises to help you:

Exercise 1 - Make a “mind map”

Start by taking a large piece of butcher’s paper, put the words “New Business or New Idea” in the center and create a collage of images, quotes, articles, your values, strengths, skills and other inspirations.

The idea behind this is that when you surround yourself with images of your intention – the successful business you want to create – your awareness and passion will grow.  As your mind map evolves and becomes more focused, you will begin to recognise where your creativity, values, strengths and skills can be focused.

Exercise 2 - Research people who have achieved the success you seek

Study people who have been successful in the business area you want to pursue and who have similar values and passion.  Study them, figure out how and why they are able to remain successful in these difficult economic times and then make plans to emulate some of their successful actions.

Exercise 3 – Create a plan or roadmap to get there

When you have gone through this creative process, the next step is to create a marketing plan.  A marketing plan is a process that helps you evaluate your idea as a market offer; evaluates the target customer and marketplace; and prepares you for the many possibilities to achieve your new business success.

At what creative stage are you? Tell me about it below? Have you found that great idea? Do you need help with a Marketing Plan?

About the author: Teresa Bassham is the principle of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing, and is passionate about educating small and medium business professionals to think deeply; create difference; engage customers; optimise marketing effort; and develop a marketing plan to achieve success in 2012.  She runs DIY workshops in Northern NSW and coach customers online and by phone – if you would like to attend the next scheduled workshop or request distance coaching online – please contact us.

For more daily Authentic Marketing updates visit and like my Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

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Authentic Marketing / Branding / Marketing 101 / Marketing Analysis Tools / Niche Marketing — No Comments
4
Mar 12

Misconceptions of Niche Marketing

With the explosion of choices available across the channels of media and the internet; businesses with limited time and budgets will be better served by defining their niche market, identifying their real customer and focussing their promotional efforts.  Niche marketing is simply creating your own clearly defined market system. There are still many misconceptions about niche marketing.

Many business professionals do have difficulty coming to terms with the suggestion that appears to restrict the ways in which they promote their message to the marketplace.  In choosing a niche market strategy, you will send the best, most authentic and most targeted message possible to a clearly defined customer segment; and vastly improve your reach and return on investment.

A good niche market is where you are:

  • Highly visible and easily accessible to the customers who will benefit from your services or products.
  • Employing the widest range of your talents, skills, and training (in your authentic and unique offer).
  • Clearly differentiated from competitors for your target customer.

The advantage of a highly targeted niche marketing strategy is not only attracting significantly more business but also provides richer opportunities for natural competitive advantage.

So how do you start to define a niche market?  Knowing and working from your skills and strengths is essential for developing a niche marketing strategy. A simple Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis (SWOT) is a good starting point.  There are probably several ways in which your skills and strengths can add value, and by looking at opportunities and threats in the relevant market industry, you will be able to can see natural matches. Therefore, developing a niche is a process of exploring several possibilities and gradually refining them.

The following questions may also help you:

  • Where do you consistently find people whose values match your own?
  • Where do you feel that you are most credible?
  • Where is there the greatest need or problem that your skills, strengths, services or products provide solution for?
  • Who are you drawn to and who are easy for you to serve?

The main concern is experiencing a level of anxiety that focusing on a niche will deprive you of needed business. What do you do if someone outside of your niche wants to consult you?  That is a decision you take depending on an assessment of fit and your current working circumstances, but always bearing in mind that it must not divert you from time with your niche customer market.  The point of a niche is not to confine you, but to create the “healthiest” market system for your business.

Have you been thinking of a niche marketing strategy and has this helped you? Please leave a comment below.

Do you have a niche marketing success story to share? Please leave your comments below.

About the author: Teresa Bassham, owner of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing, is passionate about inspiring and educating small and medium business professionals to create their authentic marketing message, attract more ideal customers and create a marketing plan to achieve success in 2012.  She runs local workshops in Northern NSW and coach customers online and by phone – if you would like to attend the next scheduled workshops or request distance coaching online – please contact me.

Follow us on Twitter: @zenworkz

Facebook: www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

 

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