May 25th, 2009 by Steven Leung

We’ve all had those moments and that day was his.  He told me about how he was going over his goals with the CEO and you could hear in his inflection that what he really wanted to say was, “April Fools, right?” But the growth he might have pulled in three extra headcount for in the past is something that became his goal for the upcoming six months.

“So how do you propose we grow our program?” he asked.  Brute force using mass media was out of the question given the budget constraints.  He wanted to leverage the channels they’d built through their blogs and email marketing.

“How is your program currently generating customer referrals?” I asked.  “No cost marketing, I like it and we do get more than a few referrals.”

Most companies get referrals from their existing customers and his was no different.  But he added, “I think there’s more we can do to get customers signing up their friends.  Most of what we do today isn’t formal, we have a great program and they tell their friends.”

The challenge with this approach was: because there’s no call-to-action, his company has left it to chance that the customer will come up with the idea of referring a friend.

“They might not know you’re looking for referrals, or they’re busy, or —” and I paused for a second.

“One of my friends has this knack for picking the worst restaurants.  One time, a place brought all of us a platter of rice that smelled and tasted like kerosene.  We sent back the rice three times before the owner came to our table, hands in the air, protesting that he didn’t smell or taste anything wrong.  We all looked at each other, settled on getting some flat bread instead, and we haven’t let my friend live it down to this day.”

“You’re obviously not saying our program is like kerosene rice…”

“Of course not, here’s the deal: we had to have been to at least a dozen good restaurants my friend’s recommended.  But after a funny story or two, he’s now got a reputation for referring us to bad restaurants.  For you, everyone knows they take a chance when they make a referral.”

“So step one is not making them look bad.”

“Right.  The next step is getting them to overcome both their inertia and the risk they take, no matter how small.”  So we went through a few of the most popular types of referral programs.

We talked about a typical affiliate referral system where a customer gets a reward or percentage for referring another person or business.  Usually this is done with a referral code embedded in a link, from a website, blog or email campaign.  That code identifies the referrer and lets your system know that a referral needs to be credited.

“The best practice here is to give both the referrer and the referral some sort of reward.  If you only reward the referrer, then it looks like that person is trying to make a sale.  If you only reward the referral, then the referrer doesn’t have a personal incentive to refer you.”  I’ve summarized the basics; there are more nuances from this word-of-mouth communication study.

The reward doesn’t always have to be monetary, though.  “You have a program where people can show how successful they’ve been using your methodology.  Many folks would be proud to share how successful they’ve been with others as part of a community, not just people they know but others who ask about your program.  It’s similar to what I’ve done for a number of software companies that want to reward people who extend their platforms.”

“The key is to lower the barriers to entry.  Make it easy.”

A referral program can spread like wildfire if the offer is strong and easy to communicate.   “So we can leverage what we’ve done on the blog and email marketing?”  It’s not difficult to automatically generate links from a blog, web publisher, or its landing pages that pass the referral code needed for this type of program.

And email marketing systems often give you the ability to embed a specific code for each person who receives your email; that code would be the referral link needed to credit both the referrer and referral.

The technology provides automation to make getting referrals easier and more scalable.  The same technology can be used to create stronger and more profitable relationships with the customers who will be providing you referrals, and influence your prospects to move from ‘maybe’ to ‘yes’.

May 21st, 2009 by Steven Leung

“I’m intrigued but my company already has a website,” he said.  Most do.  This one was a well-made site with clean copy and crisp graphics that downloaded quickly and we browsed most of its 10 pages while we were sitting at the coffee house.

We got to the page about their consulting services and I stopped for a moment to bring up a new browser window.  I asked him to describe what they did, while I opened up one of his competitors’ sites.  He read about what the competition said on their website and sighed, “Well, that’s exactly what we do too — I know we’re better but I’m not sure how we’d differentiate ourselves.”

In a way, that was true.  You could run down the checklist of all the services his company provided and it would look the same as his competition’s.  Which is one reason why their websites said basically the same things and had similar slogans.  If it weren’t for the images, you couldn’t tell them apart.

“Tell me about one of your happy customers.”  He talked about how he’d managed to save a company he was working with 20% on their labor costs because he installed an automated system to take care of something very manually intensive.  We talked some more and he had literally dozens of these types of stories that showed how his service was different than anyone else’s.

He then interjected himself and said “Well, I can’t put that on our website, we’d have to change everything every time we put one of those case studies up.”  I smiled a bit and fired up a demo of how to add content to a blog and how the navigation would adapt to fit whatever content his team added.

Then I showed him how his website can be your blog or it can be a part of your blog.  In fact, the main website can be built using the same software as your blog.  That way, he wouldn’t necessarily need a daily webmaster: the entire site is manageable by point-click-and-type.

“It’ll also make your web presence easier to find,” I said, showing him how search engines aggressively index content from blogs.  It wasn’t just search engines.  “You can also cross-promote your content automatically, on services like Twitter and LinkedIn.”

I often say that when websites are created, they’re born alone — where that proverbial tree that falls in the forest where no one hears it.  A blog is born connected to potential readers through ping services that notify dozens of websites around the world that you have new content, and through social media where your content can be integrated.

“My blog posts automatically show up on social networks like LinkedIn, where people get to know my credentials.  Then they visit my blog to get to know my company’s style and capabilities.”  He wasn’t a Twitter user so we didn’t go into this, but I’ll often cross-promote some of my articles there and get traffic and subscribers from folks doing Twitter searches.

“I’m not really into this social media stuff,” he said and then he paused.  He looked at the computer, took a sip of coffee and looked back up, “But I can use what we write for the blog in my newsletters, so we don’t have to do that work twice, right?”  I nodded and sensed he was thinking about the next step.

“And if I can email people the newsletter instead of mailing it them, I don’t need as much labor or stamps?”  Then I showed him how he could draw people back to his website and blog to provide more upsell opportunities for his sales force.

May 20th, 2009 by Steven Leung

Blogs are websites that keep and organize a running journal of articles.  You’ll find many opinions about what style of writing your blog should have, how it should be a participating member of the blogosphere, and lists of do’s and don’ts.  “The rules” make blogging sound more complex than it really is for businesses.

Blogs give businesses three distinct advantages.  First, your business will have a larger search engine presence.  It’s easier to find your business on Google with a blog than without one.  This will bring you more traffic that you can convert.

Second, your business will have a fast and convenient way of publishing ad-hoc information and syndicating it across the web.

If you know how to use Microsoft Word or equivalent, blogging will be second nature.  Then, when you have new announcements or product releases, you can write a blog post that’s about the length of a longish email and post it using your blog.

Your blog will then ping dozens of sites that will take your new content and notify hundreds of other sites, making it available to their readers.

Unlike websites, blogs are born connected to other websites. They have software built-in that talks to other sites and gives worldwide (or hyperlocal) exposure to your content.  With the right setup, your blog will even tell search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN when you’ve published new content.  That way, you’re more likely to be included and it’ll happen more quickly.

Third, blogging is the great equalizer.  A blog gives your business the opportunity to compete on equal footing with larger companies.  Instead of competing based on ad budget, you can build a reputation for expertise by describing parts of the business that only a true expert or insider would know.

As your content gets more popular and receives links from other sites, you’ll organically appear higher and more frequently on search engines.

In this age of skepticism demanding transparency, there are no more faceless corporations.  If you don’t put a face on your company, someone else will.  And what that face becomes won’t be up to you.

So no matter how large or small your company, your blog posts will help prospects and customers get to know you as a company and connect on a more interpersonal level than they would necessarily with the traditional “faceless” corporation.

Your blog doesn’t have to get a lot of comments to be successful, I’ve spoken with many businesses worry about negative comments.  When I ask whether they’d rather receive a negative comment on their blog so that they can respond, or a negative comment on a third-party site where that might not be an option, the answer was overwhelmingly one-sided.  You can turn it into a positive and there are even cases where other customers chime in about how the complaint itself isn’t merited.  Or exercise editorial control for egregious trolling.

Our next blog post talks about how blogs can be used with your current website and methods for building traffic to your web presence using traditional and social media.

December 7th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

• How Internet Marketing Is More Effective Than Traditional Advertising
• Tracking How an Actual Visitor Became a Lead
• Building a Stronger Reputation By Combining Internet and Traditional Marketing

Done correctly, Internet marketing is one of the most cost-effective mechanisms that businesses can use to generate leads.

The reason for Internet marketing is simple and ironic: permanence.   When a business launches a mail campaign, your pieces get delivered and you hope that you found enough people who are interested to make that mailing worth your while.

But most, if not all, of the mailings get thrown away.  People may not have even looked at them — and those that did may or may not remember your business. That’s why the author of The Fundamentals of Business to Business Sales and Marketing, John Coe, recommends mailing three times in a two to four week period in order to maximize effectiveness.  But after the mailers are sent, you have nothing of lasting consequence in your hands.  An online presence grows as you invest in it.
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October 7th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

• The difference between building a website and creating opportunities
• Designing websites with search engines in mind (CATTLE)
• Using technology to build an online reputation

Fundamentally, business is about creating value that customers are willing to pay for.  And at its most base level, customers buy products and services for what they help accomplish and how they make them feel.

But rarely do customers buy for technology for technology’s sake — most don’t even want to think about it.  A cell phone is a great example.  It helps people keep in touch with their family, friends, and colleagues in a way few would have imagined just a few decades ago.

People don’t want to think about cell phone towers and radio spectrum.  They want to communicate with other people conveniently and immediately.  Even technologists who always buy the latest phones aren’t buying the latest EV-DO capable handsets with MP3 capabilities — they’re buying a satisfaction to their curiosity, which makes them feel like they’re on the cutting edge.

So when people come to me with their businesses, I feel it’s critically important for me not to emphasize the technology (which is my responsibility for my clients), but to translate the technology into the opportunities it provides.
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