When you compete in a corporate landscape with automation startups and well funded SMEs, you've got no choice but to innovate. Everything from advertising agencies to film production rental companies and print shops all get hit with digital transformation. What consulting do you need?
Don't you wish there was a way to passively and automatically update Salesforce or ACT every time you send an email? I mean really, all you need is one big Crm feature. Just one:
1. Show me if anybody dropped the Email ball
That's all!
You don't need any silly features like auto email body export to spreadsheet cells or Analytics you're never going to apply. You just want to know if you've replied to everyone within 24 hours and if they've replied back to you.
If either of you dropped the ball, you just need to know which email thread to pick back up.
Personally, I don't use any Crm software because it takes too long! It's just a pain in the ass doing all that data entry. Isn't there a way to automatically update a simple spreadsheet?
Yes. There is.
Actually, not yet. We're almost done building it. It's the fixie equivalent to the 21 speed bike. It just does the most important thing: tells you who to contact now. To be more specific, here are the features: A. Tells you how many hours any email waited before a reply -- especially the ones that haven't gotten a reply. B. Shows you which messages didn't get a reply. C. Counts the number of replies in any conversation. D. Sends you an alert if you or your recipient does not reply within 24 hours. E. Lets you sort by stalest conversation or longest conversation or sender.
I'll send you a free copy of the app as soon as we launch if you tell me your email: use http://sparkah.com/contact/
In the subject line: just say "email Crm"
See you soon!
1. The more you interact with people on Google+ or Pinterest or Twitter or any other social network for that matter, the more they follow, subscribe, or circle you.
2. There are guys with a million Google+ followers who aren't celebrities.
3. If you just work on growing your audience base, you don't have time to do your actual work.
So then, how do those other guys with massive followers do it? Do they have a big business with multiple employees that just collect followers and likers all day long?
You know that a large body of contacts in all the big social media sites is pivotal to driving sales. So how do they do it? Well, a lot of these guys actually do have a large staff. Others have a huge email mailing list that they successfully converted into social media followers. It took them years building that list. Sure, they could just buy a list but when nobody on that list remembers you, you'll have abysmal conversion rates.
No, don't throw your arms up. There is a short cut.
Remember item #1 above? The more you interact and give others +1s the more they thank you by subscribing or circling you. Sure, you don't have a staff of 5 people working 3 shifts a day. You don't need them. All you need is what Steve Jobs called "human user action scripting." Just before he left Apple, he called it "Apple Script."
We just got an email from a client saying that he's tried advertising on Facebook, Linkedin, Google Adwords, and even tried Press Releases with no success. So he came to us to see if we could design a marketing strategy that would work for him. What his company does, for the sake of discussion, may as well be what your company does because the follow principle applies to everybody.
When you start marketing, you start with two assumptions. It's those two assumptions that make you fail.
You start with the assumption that
A) You provide what your target market needs / wants
B) Your target market wants / needs what you provide
Ironically, your assumptions are 100% correct. That's the problem.
If your assumptions proved wrong, eventually, you'd realize your marketing strategy was broken and go back to the drawing board. But since your assumptions are correct, you end up blaming everything else from your writer to your designer to your ad medium (magazine, adwords, facebook, etc).
We I was a kid, my Dad taught me that men need women and that women need men. For the purposes of marketing, that generalization is useful.
Me, being old-school asian, didn't date until I was 27. And boy, was that a rude awakening.
I went to the hottest bars in Del Mar, Ca: Jimmy O's, Yogi's, Duke's Office, etc. When I found a beautiful girl and an opportunity, I advertised to here. I even had a loss leader: A free top-shelf drink of her choice. Shockingly, for about a year (and I went out 3 times a week) I got shot down. I even dressed nice (design)!
That like 120 rejections in a row (Which isn't bad when compared to the average 0.4% Adwords CTR).
That's when it happened.
I scored!
When I eventually asked my first girl friend why she started dating me, she said, "I saw you before you started hitting on me. It was across the street. You held the door for an old woman and I thought, 'what a sweet guy, and he's cute! (Sigh).'"
Me being able to provide a manly service and she needing my manly service is both 100% spot-on. That got me nowhere but 100+ $14 Top Shelf Cocktails in the red. The missing link was her witnessing a demonstration of HOW I provide that service.
This one is elusive. Your customer makes service provider decisions based on whether they can visualize themselves in a relationship with you. If you can't get them to first mentally become your customer or client in vivid childhood day-dream clarity, you're not going to get them to physically become your client.
What's the best way to do that? Depends on what you do. In my case, Anne could see herself walking through a door I held for her. If you want to talk about how to convince your target market to become your customer, let's talk at http://sparkah.com/marketing
You can't totally innoculate yourself from the stress of relocation but what you can do instead is insulate yourself from it. To do that, you're going to need a conscientious, ethical, and highly considerate people to do that moving for you. The most responsible man with a van moving company in London is David's.
I've worked with him.
He has a work ethic and respect for his clients that is visible the moment you talk to him. It even comes through in his emails. I email him much more often than I speak to him.
That's why he comes with the highest of recommendations and praise from our company. Also, if you're a moving or relocation company, feel free to contact us for referrals. David gets calls from all over the world and he's only in London. Use LANYCHK.com/contact
There are just so many ways I can go with this one.
You want blog traffic and youtube video views because you want clients. It's a means to an end for you. But you don't have to complicate and elongate a short ride to the carnival. You can make the process of getting clients and building your traffic happen in one step.
How?
Being there at the right place and the right time.
But isn't that the secret to everything? Well, with youtube and your blog, how do you go about building the strategy to drive traffic? What's the right question to ask?
"Who has an urgent vested interest in my blog content and youtube videos right now?" is the question we ask. The best answer to that question is, "he who needs something accomplished now."
If your video or blog post can
A. Demonstrate how your viewer can accomplish a task
B. Convince them that hiring you is the last missing link,
You've both created a viewer/reader and a new client lead.
Do you know the difference between a bacteria and a virus?
If any of you readers knows the difference, I'd love your explanation in the comments below. In marketing, if you don't know the difference, your product will go nowhere. You can't build a product or company that acts like bacteria and expect it to "go viral."
It can't happen.
To make your product or company or idea go viral, you have to engineer it to be viral from the DNA up. Steve Jobs and Psy understood this. The iPhone and Gangnam Style's viral growth proves they did.
This is the part that nobody sees. It's the part that happens long before everyone realises what just happened. The forming of the Virus DNA.
Before Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone, he launched a confidential "project purple." In it, he partnered with 412 of the worlds most influential objective C programmers. Each of these programmers had already build up a huge fan base of users eagerly waiting to see what their next program would be. When the iPhone was first released, it had a sparce iTunes App Store with just 500 apps. Each app was tailored to the needs of each of the "project purple" programmer's fans.
Steve vested 412 influential partners before building his product.
Before PSY uploaded "Gangnam Style" on Youtube, he quietly drafted the advice of the top dance choreographers in Korea, Japan, and USA. He asked each choreographer to help him design a scene in his Billboard #1 to-be video. As soon as he uploaded the video, each choreographer blasted out the link to "Gangnam Style" to their 50,000 facebook fans saying, "here's MY new video"
Psy vested dozens of influential partners before building his product.
Before Nyan Cat went viral on Youtube and on shirts, hats, stuffed animals, apps, games, and all sorts of merchandising, Chris Torres, also known as prguitarman, asked thousands of users on the most powerful design and artist's social network, Deviantart.com for input. He didn't design by committee, he created by community. When the final version of Nyan Cat hit Youtube, he had thousands of users post the video on Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Reddit, and other artist SNS saying, "look what I made."
Chris vested thousands of influential partners before building his product.
To make your product, app, service, company or idea go viral, your virus must mutate to it's host. The more various it's host DNA, the more replication capable it becomes.
How many "idea shareholders" do you have? How many thousands of customers do you already have who gave you product design feedback for your previous version?
Should you start building your market base before you start building your product? For help, talk to us at http://sparkah.com/marketing
To crowdsource your help and network with other entrepreneurs, join our Marketing Social Network.
