Category Archives: Consulting

October 25, 2012 · 10:55 am

Maybe It’s Easy Because It’s Not Effective?

The other day I wrote about how small and medium businesses were thinking of the internet in a way that made it less of a medium.  Another day, another piece of research concerning SMB’s and digital.  Today’s comes from BIA/Kelsey via the good folks at eMarketer and it talks about how 40% of small and midsized firms planned to increase their digital spending budget within the next 12 months.  That’s not a big surprise but the fact that the SMB marketers (probably the owners too!)  are thinking multi-channel.  Smart, but also a little concerning:

Facebook has also emerged as a favored digital channel among these smaller businesses, likely due to its low-cost barriers and ease of use. In fact, 52% of SMBs said they used Facebook for advertising or promotional purposes, making it more popular for marketing than newspapers (31%), community sponsorships (27%) and email marketing (25%).

It’s the “ease of use” thing that has me worried.  Sure, it’s easy as pie to post your latest offer or remind fans that you’re open on Sunday.  However, as we’ve discussed repeatedly here on the screed, many of those “fans” aren’t interested in anything other than discounts and really won’t engage.  Without an understanding of how Facebook works, Edge Rank, and the social graph, the results from Facebook are going to equal the price of entry:  not much.  More importantly  I’m not sure the amount of daily support required  is clear to these folks.

I also find it of interest that social media is compared with three other forms of customer engagement (above) that are completely different from one another and which should be used for very different purposes.  Email should be a lot higher on SMB’s radar than it appears to be.  However, it also requires a lot more support (and can be costlier) than what Facebook appears to be on the surface.  Sponsorships are great ways to build your email list (or social followers) but if the emphasis isn’t on using email, the value of the sponsorship – and the mailing list access it should affords – lessens.

The study concludes with a note that despite all the attention paid to the “social, local, mobile” (SoLoMo) movement, SMBs are failing to recognize the benefits of linking mobile with local, an especially important element for small businesses.  No surprise – that’s a very resource-intensive area to do properly.  The key, as always, is to match the business objectives with the tools and the budgets.  Just as every business is different, so too are the ways in which those factors – objectives, budgets, and tools – combine.  As always, let me know if I can be helpful with that.

Thoughts?

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October 23, 2012 · 9:34 am

When Is A Medium Not A Medium?

An interesting piece of research from the folks at Borrell Associates this morning that concerns how small and medium businesses are using digital channels.  Given that nearly every local business seems to have a website, I wasn’t surprised to read that over half of SMB online marketing dollars are spent supporting what the survey calls “web presence.”  This is their site design and maintenance, hosting, as well as their social media management.  What I hadn’t thought about was the study’s conclusions as summed up in this post:

Digital advertising is yielding the spotlight to digital services. The emerging lesson, concludes the study, is that the Internet is actually not much of an advertising medium after all.

That was an “ah-ha!” moment for me.  Then again, I can’t remember the last time I clicked on a web banner and unless I’m searching with an intent to buy immediately (as opposed to just conducting research), I generally ignore the PPC ads that seem to surround everything.  As it turns out the average U.S. small/medium business spends $17,000 on online services, compared with $6,800 on online advertising, hence the conclusion about it not being a medium.  Then again, there is a big division even within this group since those with fewer than 50 employees will spend less than $500 a year, while a mid-size business with more than 50 employees will spend an average of $63,000.  The little guys spend a higher percentage of their budgets on web hosting and their site (make sense since this is the one indispensable element in my opinion) as well as email and SEO (getting found is always important!).  Once the budgets grow the companies can afford to branch out into other areas (blog management, analytics, etc.).

The report concludes by noting that, as the web becomes more of a basic marketing tool for business, the importance of online support services will grow as well. The midsize and larger companies are likely to internalize services that they once contracted out. Those larger companies will either assign SEO and social media management tasks to existing staff, or hire fulltime experts in digital marketing

I’ve seen that occur with some companies for which I’ve worked.  Here on the screed we probably don’t think about the interwebs as a service-driven space and probably spend too much time on it as a medium   I’m going to rethink that based on this study since many of the folks who contact me fit the small and medium business category.  What do you think?

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October 17, 2012 · 11:07 am

The P.O.D.

When I go chat with prospective clients, one of the things they often ask about is my point of differentiation.  What makes me different from any of the other consultants with whom they’re speaking?  That’s a great question each of us needs to be able to answer whether we’re trying to sell consulting services, to get a new job, or to sell a product or service in our current jobs.  If you can’t answer the question, you might want to spend a few minutes and think about it.

In any event, among the things I believe make me different are the business experiences I’ve had over the years in both traditional and digital media.  There aren’t a lot of us who were senior management in the “old” world and transitioned into the “new” one.  We usually end up talking about a few other areas – intelligence  vision, style – but the one thing I like to emphasize is keeping a focus on the business and not on the tools.

I’ve written about it before as have others.  It’s still a surprise when that prospective clients asks “how do we get good at  (pick one – the web, Twitter, social media, SEO)?  The answer is always the same – you don’t, because that’s not what you’re trying to do in the first place.  Using those tools is just a means to an end.  What you’re trying to get good at is your business and to use those things to do so.  I guess that’s a real point of differentiation because many of them hadn’t really thought about it before and the other folks with whom they’re talking seem to have spent an awful lot of time on tactics and very little on goals and strategy.  Ready, Fire, Aim.

We need to stop confusing the end with the means.  “Likes” don’t equate to sales unless you’re structured to make them do so.  Does this make sense?

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