Cadillac. Burger King. Staples.

What do these companies have in common? They are each very well known for something. What they are known for may not be unique to them, nonetheless, they each have a calling card that precedes them in the minds of most consumers. While some of it may be due to a focused marketing effort, they all back it up with the quality and service they provide.

Cadillac. They are known for being the best. For the longest time, when you were going to buy a new car and you wanted to buy the best, you bought a Cadillac. Even though new players like Lexus, BMW and Mercedes have entered the game and have their loyal following, the Cadillac is still the gold standard when it comes to quality and luxury.

In fact, Cadillac has become so ingrained as the epitome of greatness that it has almost become adjective-esque in our vocabulary. Whenever you want to describe something as being the best, it is always said to be “the Cadillac of all widgets!”

Burger King. BK is known for providing your hamburger exactly the way you want it. For example, you can simply order a Whopper and you’ll get a burger with all the fixin’s. BUT WAIT! You’re on your way to a presentation and your stomach is growling louder than the radio. You’re crunched for time so you’ll have to hit a drive-thru. You can’t water the eyes of your prospect with funky breath so you have to eat something without onions. Well, luckily Burger King allows you to order it without the onions!! Phew! Saved by the King!

(Pssst! You can also order sans-onion at McDonalds with the Quarter-Pounders and at Wendy’s with their hamburgers as well. But it is Burger King that is synonymous with catering your specific hamburger needs.)

Staples. “That Was Easy!” When you need office supplies and need them without any complications, you go to Staples. When you need something printed or copied on the fly, you go to Staples. When you need assistance with purchasing a piece of technology (e.g. computer, printer, camera, software) you go to Staples. Why? Because they make it easy.

Could you also get excellent products, service and technical assistance at your local downtown office shop? Sure you can! Are they “known” for it? Maybe. But in our hectic day-to-day schedules, when we need something for the office, Staples has made it EASY for us to decide where to go.

So what are YOU known for? Is your answer based on what you think you’re known for, or is it based on what your customers have told you? If you’re not sure, ask some of your best and loyal customers what it is about you that they continue to choose to do business with you. It’s possible their answers may surprise you.

For example, there is a company I work with whose product is the “Cadillac” in their industry. It carries a great warranty and is installed by a crew with incredible work ethic and attention to detail. For the longest time, the benefits of the product, the warranty and the hard working crew were believed to be the major selling points. Although these things were important, when their customers were asked what they valued most about working with them, it was the professionalism and communication from everyone in the organization that resonated throughout every response. It was those two qualities that really separated them from any other company their customers had ever worked with.

So, again I ask you, what are you known for? Here is your homework assignment. First, either call or ask just ten of your best customers the next time you call on them what it is about you or your company that drives them to continue to loyally do business with you. Second, ask them to take a couple minutes to put it in writing.

Now that your calling card is identified, utilize it with new prospects when giving your presentation and by providing them with copies of those customer testimonials.

Now Go Get ‘Em!!

Your time is valuable. Your money is valuable. Perhaps even more valuable than both of them combined are leads for increasing businesses and profits. An excellent source of filling your funnel with new leads and prospects are local business expos and trade shows.

Although you will have a few “trick-or-treaters” (people who just walk around and fill their bags with your schwag), most of the people that attend these shows have at least a curiosity of the products and services represented and many have direct needs going in. This may be one of the top three things you can do with the biggest bang for your buck – and your time – since your time and money are focused directly at the people you are targeting.

The rewards can be great, but successful business expos and trade shows require considerable advance preparation to get the return you want. If you aren’t ready, not only can it be a waste of your time and money, it can also lead to a logistical nightmare. To avoid this nightmare, use the following tips to develop a solid game plan, monitor your progress and be prepared to adapt as needed.

BEFORE THE SHOW

1.  Read the enclosed Exhibitor Information material

·  Review the floor plan and the items that are included in your booth
·  Determine additional items you’ll need to bring in addition to your product and displays
·  Review parking and set up instructions to avoid frustrating delays upon arrival

2.  Identify your goals

·  Define exactly what you want to accomplish as a result of your participation in the show
·  This may include: increased visibility, lead generation, or checking out your competition
·  Setting concrete goals will help you determine if your time was well spent and to evaluate future participation

3.  Define measurements of success

·  For each goal, determine a way to measure its success. Make these measurements as specific as possible.  It could be to hand out 1000 brochures, obtain contact information for at least 200 prospects, or meet 5 new contractors or strategic partners to do business with. These benchmarks will help you decide whether the show was worth the expense.

4.  Put your show plan in writing

·  Develop a schedule of who will work your booth and at what times
·  Develop a comprehensive list of preparation activities, including: building the display, ordering materials and printing brochures, among other things you may need
·  Assign individuals to complete tasks and timelines for when they should be completed

5.  Develop a key message for your booth exhibit

·  Develop and promote one major or primary message
·  Reducing multiple messages eliminates confusion and allows your prospects to focus on who you are and how you can help them

6.  Design an open and inviting booth

·  An open booth design invites your prospects to “stop in” to see you
·  Your logo should be big enough to be seen from a good distance
·  Do not place your table at the front of your booth and sit behind it!!
·  Maximize “walking around” space by placing brochure displays against the walls or on tables along the walls

7.  Advertise your show participation

·  Advertise your presence in anything you send out prior to the big weekend
·  This could include postcard mailings, estimates, invoices, etc.
·  Use a simple tag line like: “See us at Booth #15 at the Chamber Business Expo  on October 7th”

8.  Order all necessary supplies, including brochures and giveaways

·  DO THIS EARLY!! You won’t be the only one needing to order printed materials and probably not the only one that waits until the last minute. Do not get caught without these materials because you didn’t give the printer enough time to get to your order.
·  Design forms for filling out prospect information – clear forms eliminate guesswork and shows your prospects that you are organized with attention to detail
·  Consider giveaways to generate attention and a sense of fun. These don’t have to be expensive. Pens with your logo, web address and a catchy slogan can be very effective.

9.  Design PowerPoint presentations and demos for the booth

·  A PowerPoint presentation running on a laptop or monitor not only allows your prospects to learn more about you, but gives them something to do – and stay at your booth – while you are talking to other prospects

10. Create a unique identity for you and your booth staff

·  Have a dress code for your staff
·  The best one will have everyone wearing the same thing or at least the same type of clothing – preferably with your company logo on it
·  A matching dress code will make your representatives easily identifiable

11. Train your exhibit staff before each show

·  This is crucial! Your staff needs to know what your expectations are relating to performance, dress, actions and communication
·  Go over all of the products/services that you want to be promoted and emphasized
·  They must know how to run the demos and presentations and know how to troubleshoot them if needed – nothing looks more unprofessional than a demo that does not work

As you can see, there definitely is a lot of preparation that goes into having a successful show. But do not let this deter you! The rewards you can reap far exceed the time you will spend on your successful preparation. Check back next week for tips on successful activities while you are at the expo. Now, go get ‘em!

e- [eee]  (used in combination) A prefix that stands for “electronic” and refers to information technologies, business and almost anything connected to or transmitted over the internet.

If you were to ask me what one single method I would recommend to reach your customers and prospects on a regular basis, I would say an e-Newsletter hands down! Mind you, I am not saying that an e-Newsletter should replace every other form of marketing and advertising that you do. There are many benefits to the other methods, but dollar-for-dollar e-Newsletters are the way to go. In fact, there are so many benefits to this form of marketing and communication that it warrants a full featured article.

Awareness – Let’s start with the obvious. Just as with any other type of marketing, you want to build awareness of you and your product or service. The old rule of thumb is that it takes seven contacts before someone makes a buying decision. I’ve recently read that seven is actually pretty light now. With e-Newsletters, the number of contacts you make only depends on the frequency you send out your e-Zine (another name for e-newsletter).

Relationships – With a written e-Newsletter, you are able to build a relationship with your customers and prospects. Every issue you send is packed with usable and valuable information that your readers will look forward to receiving. The relationship you build is that of a trusted advisor. The more and more you give through sharing ideas with your readers, the more and more they will view you as the authority that you are.

Immediate – This benefit is two-fold. One, the e-mail, when written and sent, is immediately received by your target audience. You do not have to wait for that direct mail piece to be printed and delivered. You don’t have to wait for the Sunday paper to hit or for your audience to tune in the station you are advertising on. With e-Newsletters, you only have to wait for your readers to check their inbox – which with some people is as frequent and involuntary as breathing.

The other side of Immediate is the type of response you can get. If your e-Newsletters are providing valuable information and ideas and contain an effective call to action, a simple click of the Reply button gets the ball rolling. This has the potential for being much more immediate than picking up the phone and making a call.

Inexpensive – Many e-Newsletter services are very, very inexpensive compared to other forms of marketing and advertising. Although most are fairly user friendly to set up, it may be worth the added expense to have someone create your account, develop your template, build your re-direct pages and get it working exactly the way it should. But once that expense is out of the way, you can reach up to 2500 readers for $30 (depending on the service you use).

Think of that! Thirty bucks a month to reach 2500 people that are looking forward to hearing from you in each and every issue. What’s more is with most services you can send e-mails out as often as you want – once a month, once a week or even once a day! For thirty bucks? Seriously!? That’s a no-brainer!

Track Activity – This is a very powerful tool that is built in to most e-newsletter services. Say you send out your e-Newsletter to 268 readers on Thursday morning. As soon as your readers begin to open it, you can start getting live reports on how many people opened it up and more importantly, who is opening it. If you have links in your e-Newsletter that direct your readers back to your website, you can see those as well. This kind of market research is invaluable information for you.

Gain Insight – Once you’ve sent out your e-Newsletter and read your activity reports, you can discover how effective it was based on your reader’s actions. If you find that you are getting higher open rates on one particular topic, you may want to consider writing about that topic more frequently.

Segmentation – After gaining insight into what topics your readers are more interested in, you can very simply segment your main subscriber list into topical lists and send just those readers more detailed communications or even special offers that they may be interested in. This is the ultimate in tracking your marketing efforts and targeting specific audiences with exactly what they want and need.

Commitment – Everything above details the overwhelming benefits of sending out e-Newsletters. However, there is a time commitment that you must be willing to give in order for your efforts to be successful.

At a minimum, you will want to send out your e-Newsletter once a month. My recommendation is once a week. You may think find a few extra hours a week to do this would be impossible, but once you get into a groove it become part of your weekly routine and budget your time accordingly. Make the commitment, stick to it and watch the response you get. It will be like no other!

CAUTION! – Do not send out “ME”-Newsletters!! Your readers will not want to read about you every week. Your e-Newsletter is not a weekly or monthly advertisement – at least not directly. Your e-Zine must contain valuable information for your readers to use regardless if they ever pick up the phone or hit the Reply button. If your content falls short of that, your readers will get in itchy trigger finger to hit the UnSubscribe button and then they are gone!

Recommendation – When I started my e-Newsletter, I researched over a dozen services and tested eight of them. The service that I felt stood head and shoulders above the rest is Constant Contact. To learn more about it, you can visit constantcontact.com or you can call (989.546.7355) or e-mail me (workinghard@helpingusellu.com) with any questions you have.

googlicious [goo-guhl-lish-us]  -adjective 1. describes a website that is appealing to the on-line search engine Google, therefore achieving a higher page rank;  2. describes a website whose Google search listing description is appealing to its users which results in a higher click-through ratio

Last week we looked at how a blog can be beneficial to promoting your business. To re-cap a few of the major benefits, a blog can help you become more personable and more approachable as well as help you be viewed as an authority in your industry or market. A blog can also help you get information to your customers, prospects and followers immediately, build brand and business awareness and help you gain insight to what is in your customer’s head.

This week, we will look at how implementing a blog can be a huge benefit to your business’ website. Adding a blog to your website is like giving it a shot of steroids or WGH – “website growth hormone!”

In general, the biggest difference between a website and a blog is that a website typically is much more static than a blog. In other words, the content of a website remains largely unchanged for longer periods of time, where a blog’s content is quickly and easily changed as frequently as you need or desire. It is the consistent content feeding that helps your website become more Googlicious!

I don’t want to get too much into SEO (search engine optimization) in this article as there are many, many ways to optimize your website to achieve higher and higher page rankings in the search engines. The only optimization I want to look at is as it relates to the benefits of your website having a blog.

Starting off, I mentioned last week that I thought Blogger was a more user friendly blogging tool in that the drag and drop functionality is easy to use, change, update and publish. However, there are two major drawbacks. The first is that a Blogger blog does not share your website’s domain name. The blog address will typically look something like this: yoursitename.blogspot.com. The second drawback is Blogger typically functions outside of your website and your site’s server.

The blogging tool that avoids these drawbacks is WordPress (www.wordpress.com). Although it is a little more rigid, it plugs right into your existing site and shares your site’s domain name where it would look something like this: yoursitename.com/blog. The major benefit to this is how and how often the search engines will now crawl your website.

Alright, let’s bring it back in a little bit. Let’s assume you have a modest website built with maybe 6-10 pages where most of the content on each page is pretty descriptive but doesn’t change too often. The search engine “robots” are continuously out there crawling around the web looking for new, fresh content. Since your website is pretty static, the robots won’t crawl it very often. This lack of activity negatively affects your site’s page ranking – or at least it doesn’t help it any.

Now let’s assume you add your WordPress blog as a plug-in to your website and it shares the same domain name.  Let’s also say you post a couple articles, thoughts, ideas, tutorials etc. per week. Now when that robot is out there crawling around, it is finding your fresh content from your blog, and since your blog and website share the same name, your site’s ability to climb the page ranks in the search engines increases exponentially.

One very important thing to keep in mind pertains to the content you are adding to your blog. The articles, thoughts, ideas and other entries you post should be of high value and be relevant to the content of your website. The same pertains to any links that you provide in your blog entries as well. Don’t ask me how, but those robots are pretty slick at detecting genuine posts.

With that said, let’s call it good right here with this article, otherwise we will get away from the primary focus of why you should really consider adding a blog to your website – to increase traffic, sales and profits! If you have questions relating to this article, feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail. And as always, thank you for stopping by!

blog [blawg]  -noun 1. short for weblog – (world wide) web + log;  2. an on-line diary;  3. a chronological log of thoughts or information that is posted on a web page

Have you ever heard a word you’ve never heard before, and then it seems like you hear it all the time? Or what about when you bought your new car? When you got it, it seemed pretty unique because you hadn’t seen any or very few of them on the road. Then you saw a dozen of the exact same car – same kind and color – from the time you drove it off the lot until you pulled it into your driveway for the first time!

Well, it’s been that way lately with blogs. I’ve been working on and updating mine more and more. I’ve been receiving more and more questions about them lately. And I’ve been learning more and more about the benefits of having and maintaining a blog. So this week, we will look at the many benefits of blogging for your business.

Whether or not you have a website, a blog carries many benefits for your business. Next week we will look at the benefits of a blog as a complement to your website. But for this week’s article, we will look at the benefits purely based on the merits of a stand-alone blog:

• Quick and easy – Setting up the blog template can take a little time, both to learn how to set it up as well as the time it takes to actually do the set-up. However, once the blog template is set up and published, it is very quick and very easy to add content to your blog in the form of thoughts, information and communication as well as advertising specials, promotions and new product announcements.

• Very inexpensive – If you do not have the time nor desire to set-up your blog, one can be set-up for you for as little as a couple hundred bucks. From there, the only investment you have is your time as there are no monthly or annual hosting fees you have to pay to keep it active.

• Become a friend – Because you are writing in your own voice and in your own style, your customers and prospects that are reading your blog can connect with you in a unique way and in a unique tone that cannot be felt through a static website or brochure. Even the prospects that don’t know you, will soon feel as if they do.

• Become an authority – When you verbally tell someone something, you are a resource. However, when people read something that you have published, you become an authority.

• Provide immediate information – If you have something that you need to broadcast to your customers and prospects, the quickest way to do it is through a blog entry. Many people that follow your blog will subscribe to it. As a subscriber, they receive notification whenever you post a new entry.

• Accessible and approachable - When people read your blog, they connect with you on a different level than through a website or your company brochure. You have a one-on-one conversation with every person that is reading. If they have a question or a thought about your entry, they can post a comment which further establishes a sense of accessibility and approachability.

• Gain insight - When your customers and prospects read your blog and leave comments, you begin to obtain a better understanding of what they are thinking and in turn what they expect. You can also track the number of hits you get on each post which digs even deeper into the mindset of your customers. This kind of information is priceless and is very difficult to track with most any other medium.

• Build awareness - The rule of thumb is it takes seven contacts with a prospect to make a sale or become top of mind when they think of your product or service. With a blog, you can have dozens if not hundreds of contact opportunities with your customers and prospects in a very short amount of time.

Starting out, I am using the blog to post my weekly newsletter articles for people that do not subscribe to the newsletter. (Shame on them!) As it grows in followers, I will begin to add additional posts with other tips and ideas.

Once you decide to get into the Blog world, here are a few tips and resources for you to use to start your blog and to successfully and effectively use your blog to grow your business.

• Don’t get too carried away with using countless gadgets/widgets. (You’ll learn what these are when you set up your blog.) My advice is to only use those that add value to your blog.

• Speaking of value, and this is VERY important, be sure that your blog entries are thoughts, ideas or information that provide value to your readers. It is ok to plug your products or services, as long as each post isn’t a blatant commercial. You’ll gain a good following by being a resource, not a pitchman.

• Be consistent and be patient. The growth, success and power of your blog will not happen overnight. It might not happen in a month. It may even take half a year or longer for it to build momentum and really take off. But the key is to build it, feed it, promote it and allow it to work for you. Make a commitment to post at least weekly. Eventually, a couple of short posts a week with valuable information will be great. Again, the key is “valuable content.”

Well there you have some good stuff to get you going. Good luck with your blogging adventure and journey. Let me know how it is going and when you got it up and running, send me an e-mail with a link to it.

Branding (braend-ing) -noun: 1) how you want a consumer to perceive you, your product or your service; 2) the sum total of a company’s value, including products, services, people, advertising, positioning, and culture; 3) the use of logos, symbols, or product design to promote consumer awareness of goods and services.

If you are in business or sales, odds are you know about or have at least heard of “branding.” In short, it is the message that you send to your customers and prospects. I think definition #2 is the most complete, but I like to take it a step further by going beyond the marketing materials, ads and customer service. If you make a promise and over-deliver, you’re building your brand. When you arrive early, you’re building your brand. The intangibles you can provide that your competition doesn’t – or won’t! – builds your brand.

Back to the imaging end of branding, many businesses think that a branding campaign is only for the “big” businesses that can afford flashy ad agencies. This does not have to be the case. Simple steps can be taken that can make the smallest business be perceived as the “major player” that they really are or could be! Even better, it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg to do it. Heck, it could cost as little as only a finger or two! (Maybe a bad analogy…but you get the point!)

It’s been said that a person’s perception is their reality. Therefore, how a person perceives you or your business is how you will initially be judged by them in their decision to do business with you. Putting your best foot forward with a consistent theme and message – your brand – increases positive perception. Better perception = better sales opportunities.

If asked what the image related items are, that typically are used while doing business, most answers would include: website, brochures, business cards, letterhead, envelopes, and signage. These are maybe a few of the more obvious items. But what about items that carry your logo such as clothing, pens, key chains and other give-away items?

Dig deeper. Could we also carry our brand throughout the business documents that we use such as estimates, invoices, receipts and surveys? Sure we could! All it takes is a conscious effort and a commitment to carry your brand throughout all of these things that you are already doing and printing anyway. The goal is for anyone to look at anything you have and be able to identify and connect with you in the look, feel and message it contains.

If you feel your “brand” needs an Extreme Makeover and have someone you work with on the design of these items, get with them to build and implement your consistent theme and message. If you need someone to help you do this, give me a call or drop me an e-mail and let me know. I’d be excited to work with you – and to Help You