Top tips for SME’s

Are you fed up with the number of management effectiveness top tips offered in almost every other business magazine?

However you describe or name them, management skills are much more about circumstance and location.

Each company has its own unique combination of people, processes and market dynamics.

Having helped many SME’s to improve their management effectiveness, to me achieving this goal boils down to just three simple words; Vision, Mission and Omission.

• Without a clear Vision communicated by the Directors or senior managers of a company, the raison d’etre is lost and all that follows it. 
• It is the job of the middle managers to expand on the Vision to create individual department Missions. If for example the vision of the organisation is to operate trains nationwide profitably, the mission of each department should focus on how to deliver this. 
• The workforce in any organisation then performs the daily processes to achieve the vision and mission. This is where smaller organisations often fall down. Usually with team leaders and managers having to multi task, key skills will simply be missing. It is essential that these organisations identify the Omissions or ultimately they will fail. Suggest ‘consultancy’ to these types of companies and it can be treated with doubt or cynicism. However for an SME to be truly successful, its management team must identify the omissions and seek to fill the gaps.

At this time this is particularly relevant to the export world with so many companies being encouraged to expand sales internationally to achieve growth. This is one discipline where experience and knowledge are vital to success. If you are a company based in the North East of England ask your local UKTI contact about the funded Virtual Export manager scheme which is a great way to get started.

Reasons to believe

When we meet start up businesses our first marketing task is often to convince the owners that a nice logo is not the company branding in its entirety.

Of course it is important but a nice ‘badge’ rarely establishes a successful business on its own. Then we move onto traditional concepts such as business personality, benefits and differentiators over the competition.

Until recently this is far as it went. Then a few weeks ago a new client asked me “This all looks good but how can I make my target customers believe it?” This struck a chord. He was right. Every new business needs to communicate reasons to believe.

Yet how can a new business achieve this when it is an unknown quantity? After much thought and debate between us we decided there were three techniques that can help.

1. Know your competitors inside out by engaging with their service as much as possible. If you are going to open a hairdressers, go and get your hair cut or styled in as many of the competitors as possible (albeit this may take a few months!). This will not only improve the differentiators encompassed in the branding but help to develop reasons to believe. 
2. Keep in very close dialogue with the first set of customers that are captured. This means more than just gaining testimonials. It is about capturing their descriptions of the experience, ensuring their comments are guided towards the benefits and differentiators of the brand. Categorise these customers in a way that enables the business to check that those who would be expected to return, do so. 
3.  If the business is web based, ensure you capture as many real photographs as possible. Avoid the use of stock images. If your company has created a wonderful landscape garden for a customer, photograph it not just at the end but from the beginning. Create a short video, using your iphone if necessary. Make the content rich and interesting. Visual reasons to believe are amongst the most powerful, and if planned, need not be expensive to capture. 

These are our ideas. If you have different experiences please let us know. It would be great to hear from you.

Why aren't all web designers millionaires?

Think about it, if you knew how to sell things profitably online why would you bother developing sites for other people? It is because well designed websites are just part of what is needed online? So instead of updating your Twitter feed or adding a pithy post to your Facebook page please have a think about your company's website and whether it is doing the job you hoped for. Fundamentally, is it making you money either by selling things or creating new customer enquiries?

The purpose of any businesses website is simple. Firstly, you want it to attract the right visitors, secondly the site content needs to engage people sufficiently to encourage them to purchase your products or encourage them to give you a call. If you are running Google Analytics you can obtain this information in minutes.

In my experience the best approach is to look at your site one page at a time and assess whether all the pages on your current or planned site have a clear purpose. Websites are just a collection of pages and Google ranks pages not websites so thinking why a page deserves to be on your site is a good place to start. We spend hours pondering visual routes, graphical languages and photographic styles but sometimes forget to think what a piece of content is actually meant to achieve. Just because it was in the last brochure you had printed is not sufficient justification.

You and your business have a personality. Does this come across on your website? Also, please think carefully about over using stock photography that bears no reflection on who you are and what you offer. If your business is not comprised of an ethnically diverse mix of very beautiful people then why give this impression online?

So before you set off and experiment with re-marketing, social media and online advertising why not spend a little time thinking about how your website is performing and how accurately it represents what your business is actually about. So think less about the aesthetic and more about personality.

Originally published at http://8020thinking.tumblr.com/post/45993907080/why-arent-all-web-designers-millionaires

Is your business ready to change?

When working as a psychotherapist I know that the most important two questions I ask a client before any work commences are “Do you want to change the ways in which you are currently living your life?” and “Are you prepared for the challenges ahead as you undertake those changes?”

Surprisingly organisations that I have met do not approach the subject of change in the same way. 

When organisations face problems, the most common form of change they undertake is to re-organise. However unless they ask themselves an amended version of the first question “What are the quantifiable objectives you hope to achieve as a result of these planned changes”, it has every chance of being change for change sake. And then what about the challenges ahead?

The change process creates new or more intense challenges. The three main effects tend to occur in:

• Communication. How do you stop the rumour mongering?
• Procedures. Many organisations are like trains, they run very effectively in a straight line but even the equivalent of “leaves on the line” can cause major disruption
• Personal relations. This can become strained as team dynamics and alliances are impacted. 

 So the advice from It is rocket science is to ensure that your organisation answers the two key questions before any change begins. This is particularly important for small companies or groups where any negative financial impact will be that much harder to overcome.

Replace habit with thinking

Both in business and our personal lives we are all guilty of continuing with a behaviour we know is both wasteful and damaging. We become weirdly trapped by our own history, reluctant to challenge the main reason for our predictability -which often come down to - that’s the way we have alway done it.

Why not pick one thing you are unhappy with regarding how your business operates and have close look at what you could do differently. If you annually produce a company brochure lets revisit how well the last version performed. Who was it sent to? How was the mail out followed up? What do the sales people think about it? Did it make money?

Marketing and sales is about customer acquisition and retention so if the brochure is not delivering on these 2 criteria it is time to think about the content, how it is being distributed and ultimately if it is the right tactic to generate more revenue.

By constantly re-thinking old habits we can embed a challenging culture in the business that helps a business driven by continuous improvement. 

The death of traditional marketing

If like me, you work within the marketing industry, be ready for at least 5 years of massive change. The choice of channels and media has never been more diverse. We have the ability to deliver bespoke messages to highly targeted audiences, create online ads that follow people around the internet and then provide detailed response rates to our clients. So putting messages in front of people is the easy bit. Delivering reach is no longer much of a skill. What is more challenging is connecting with people in a way that turns them into customers. The ability to create campaigns that connect is now what is required.

The power of word of mouth marketing is a given but now it has evolved and become massively amplified. Imagine, you are about to enter a restaurant, and before stepping inside one of your mates leaps out of no where and tells you the food is terrible and the service is diabolical. After you have recovered from the shock I’m guessing you would immediately think about going somewhere else. What if he then suggested a great alternative close by? Chances are you’d give it a go. This behaviour is exactly what is happening online every second of every day and is only set to increase.

SMART technology is making people smarter and more informed about what products and services are on offer anywhere in the world. They can also quickly learn what friends, followers and other customers have said about the quality and value of what they have purchased and experienced. The lazy mass marketing campaigns of the past that incorporated a standard formula of TV, Radio, Press, Outdoor and ….”Oh and we better knock up a little website as well” are over.

Look at the recent campaign for Old Spice - 200 YouTube videos produced by Wieden+Kennedy in 48 hours. Time to accept we are all going to have to do more with less or change our revenue models.What about being paid on results? With Google, the ad world’s frenemey, offering hugely powerful media buying and research tools, all for free, it is hard to see how existing agency models can survive.

Marketing companies need to think like businesses partners focussed on helping clients to create better products and customer experiences to differentiate them from their competitors. It is not about helping clients make their products look great, it is all about helping them make their products really great.