The mass market is no longer important

Do you still cater to the mass market? i.e. the hundreds if not thousands of people out there who are all constantly bombarded by mass media on their TVs, their daily drive, and even their phones?

It’s time to stop worrying about them and spending your precious marketing dollars in a way that broadcasts to such a wide audience. I love this idea by Seth Godin, my favourite marketing guru. He says “The mass market is no longer important – the edges are what’s most important.” What does this mean?

For me personally, what it meant is that when I started my business, I was a general creative, meaning anyone who happened upon my website or was referred to me was business. Of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and business was steady but pretty competitive as there were many other “general” designers out there who, on the face of things, looked and operated very similarly.

But once I thought about what business I really enjoyed, it tended to be a few specific areas. So I streamlined my website portfolio and used my social media accounts to highlight branding & marketing in these sectors. Of course, this is a scary step as potential clients in other industries may take a look and see that I am not for them.

…I hear this from new businesses all the time when I ask them their target demographic: “Oh, it’s everyone! Man or woman, aged 20-70, anyone really!” They are hesitant to narrow the demographic down as this might mean saying no to potential income. But actually, the reverse is completely true! The people who DO identify within your demographic will see your branding and your messaging and see that it is speaking directly to THEM, unlike all of the other marketing messages they see and hear throughout their day. They will come straight to you, and no one else, because you “get” them. You’ve probably heard all about your brand’s “tribe”, and this is the tribe you should be seeking to build.

This worked for me, too! Of course, I still get new work outside my target industries through word of mouth, and I’m happy to do those projects as referrals are generally great people to work with. But all my new work is (wonderfully) generally within my target industries, and so I can offer even more value as I understand the industry based on my previous experience with it.

So find your “edge” – embrace it, and then find those people who are just as excited about it as your are.

Companies who rock Twitter

In last month’s column, I gave you a gentle nudge toward trying your hand at Twitter if you haven’t done so yet. On the flip side, there are companies out there who have got very comfortable with the medium and add a nice dose of humour to our day.

One great example is Wendy’s; they’ve been ribbing McDonald’s for using frozen beef in their hamburgers for over a year now. It’s been just funny enough that the praise has outweighed the criticism. Taking quite a risk, they even moved the roasting off the Twitter platform and into a Superbowl TV commercial which read ““The iceberg that sank the Titanic was frozen, too.’” Take a look at what they just posted last month:

In general, people appreciate the humour, and give the meanness in their tweets a pass.

Wendy’s has such a great voice on Twitter that its fans even create content for them, which in turn increases their brand awareness to levels that no TV spot could ever do. Consider this exchange:

In the end, Carter Wilkerson got 4.3 millions retweets, so Wendy’s gave him the nuggets anyway, and in the meantime the tweet got the record for the most retweets, surpassing Ellen DeGeneres. It would seem like this just fell into Wendy’s lap, but in truth, the only reason Mr. Wilkerson reached out to Wendy’s in the first place was because he knew their Twitter was managed by real people who engaged and connected with its audience in a regular and genuine way. Crafting that voice and content takes time and dedication.

Imagine what you could do with your business if you (or an employee of yours) decided to dedicate time to engage with your own audience? Think of the feedback you could get; the negative comments would help you learn how to improve your customer experience and figure out where the pain points are, and the positive ones would find its way into the Twitterverse, thereby increasing brand recognition. Additionally, those ever lovely hashtags would help narrow the audience to your geographic location and/or industry.

Your audience awaits!

Demystifying hashtags

For those of you knowing that you should have jumped on the social media bandwagon long ago, but felt too intimidated to do so, I suspect one of the main reasons for your trepidation was that strangely ubiquitous symbol “#”. What’s it for, anyway? Why use it at all? To a novice, the symbol may seem unnecessary.

In social media circles, the hashtag, or “#” symbol first appeared in Twitter as a way for people to categorize the kind of content they were contributing. Typically you would tweet your thought/comment/status, and attach hashtags at the end that would be related to your topic. Over time, with enough hashtags present, it became a simple way for someone to find all tweets related to a location, theme, or event. With its utility proven on the Twitter, other social media platforms quickly adopted the same convention.

From a business perspective, hashtags have several uses. A significant one would be if you were at a industry event that publicized a hashtag associated with that event. In realtime, while you are in attendance, you can quickly see what others are experiencing/commenting on at the same event. It’s a great way to meet new people, as their tweets can be a great conversation starter.

If you are considering running a contest as a way to increase your social media follower base, you will want to create a hashtag associated with the contest as an easy way to both track who is participating and for other people to quickly find the contest and participate, thereby learning about your business along the way.

Locally, we have some great hashtags that are worth exploring, both to learn more about our community and the great things that are happening here, and as tools you can use to increase your business’ presence on social media. Some examples are:

#stthomasproud #stthomasontario #elgincounty #explorerailwaycity #ontsouthwest #shop519 #aylmerontario #portstanley

Keep in mind hashtags are somewhat fluid; you need to continue to use social media on a regular basis to stay aware of which hashtags are waning in popularity and which new ones are on the horizon. You can’t really go wrong when using them (so long as you are not exploiting them), so have fun experimenting and exploring new content.

Happy Hashtagging!

The M-Word

Money is the source of everything in a business, and ultimately determines many of the decisions we make, from pricing to expenses to marketing decisions. And since this issue is focussing on investing and RRSPs, I thought I would look at finances from an online perspective.

The internet has revolutionized what it means to finance an endeavour. In the past you would have to either 1) sell your idea to a relatively small group of close friends and family or 2) approach large institutions for business loans and/or 3) get backing and support by an industry partner in return for, ultimately, being “owned” by them (as in the case of record labels or publishing companies).

But at present, with just a small amount of online know-how, if you can dream it, you can build it. The basic idea is called “Crowdfunding”, and this describes the process whereby instead of approaching a small group of people for a large sum of cash, you do the reverse and ask a very large group of people for very small sums of cash! In this way you are not asking any one person for a large, possibly painful investment; rather, each individual is giving away a very small amount of money (even as small as $5) Now of course as in any transaction, no one gives anything away for free, so the participants in return are given a small amount of “ownership” in the project, and this can mean anything, depending on how the project is set up.

One major online version of this is Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/). At the time of writing of this article, the website boasted 138k+ projects. Essentially a person or group pitches their idea, the cost of that idea, and then details a multi-tiered pricing structure. At each tier is a suggested donation/investment amount, and tied to that amount might be the result of the project itself (i.e. a book, or membership), or perhaps something larger if you contribute more (i.e. invitation to an exclusive event). The great thing about this idea is that if you are particularly passionate about an industry, and want to consider giving to this cause, you can be very detailed about the kind of project you’d like to support! As established businesses, this is a great way to give back to your community or industry; essentially possibly paving the way for a younger generation who will eventually be filling our shoes.

I found some Canadian examples ranging from a shoe start-up, to a self-published mystery novel, to a group seeking capital to build an indoor children’s playground.

While it seems like a dream come true (you mean people will just hand me money??) in the reality a crowdfunded project requires a great deal of planning and marketing. You will need to build a successful tiered pricing point structure that suits everyone’s budget, and a strong social media presence to build a following. Your idea should be somewhat noble in it’s cause, and if it’s not, you should be prepared to offer an excellent product or service that rivals or exceeds your competitors. You may have to give some of your product away (e.g. share a chapter of your upcoming novel, or offer to write music for a donor, or plan a launch party event) But in the end all of this just builds community and support which will ultimately lead to a more successful launch. What are you dreaming of building?

People to follow

As a creative professional who also self-markets, I need to keep up on the latest and greatest in a variety of sectors in order to stay on top of the game. Continual learning and development is important to keep my skills honed as the market is ever-changing.

One of the way I do this is by following some pretty interesting people on social media. They’ve made it huge in this new economy, by breaking down traditional barriers through unusual means to achieve near celebrity status in their respective worlds. It’s like Justin Bieber getting discovered on YouTube, but for business!

The first one is Gary Vaynerchuk (https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/). He started a video blog about wine back when he was helping his parents run their local wine store. By continually adding valuable content to his niche using a medium that was very new and fresh for its time, he grew a large online audience and grew the business ten-fold in 5 years. Today he runs Vayner Media, described as a “ social media-first digital agency”. He made Forbes best 40 under 40 list. I’ve read his book “Crush It!: Why Now Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, where he is right in saying that you can totally win at the social media game, but it will take hard work, daily perseverance, and an eye on the long-term goal. “Know yourself. Choose the right medium, choose the right topic, create awesome content, and you can make a lot of money being happy.” You’ll find plenty of his random musings on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, and on his video blog #askgaryvee.

I mentioned a few articles back another big influencer, Scott Stratten, author of The UnMarketing Book. Scott is a Canadian who made it huge on Twitter and was named one of the Top 5 Social Media Influencers in the world by Forbes.com. His mantra is “Great Brands are built by great employees”, so treat your employees like gold because they are ones who will interact with your customers. One review on Amazon says “There is a huge emphasis in the book about moving away from standard best practices and how to be one step better then your competitors. As marketers we spend time interacting with our customers but yet fail in many ways when it comes to engaging with them.”

Ilise Benun is a marketing coach who specializes in working with creatives. She completely understands the stress and roller coaster life of a creative professional, whether you are a writer, photographer, or otherwise “creatively self-employed “. Her tagline “Advice & Accountability for Creative Businesses” describes her perfectly. She has a great podcast and sells or gives away lots of great online resources for getting yourself on track, either financially (by figuring out how much you need to charge to cover your costs and pay yourself), how to write proposals, and resources for creating a marketing plan. Her best advice to me was to start a newsletter, which I really didn’t think would work but it has consistently brought me business every time I write one!

So there you have it – if you are looking for some new people to add on Twitter or follow on LinkedIn, these would be some great places to start. Happy surfing!

All media is now optional

In the past, if you wanted to engage in some marketing, you’d take out a full page ad in the paper, or perhaps produce a television commercial, or maybe get a radio spot. Maybe you’d even do all 3, spending thousands of dollars along the way.

The great thing about that media, in that time, was that everyone consumed content in the exact same way. There were only so many radio, televisions stations or newspapers to choose from, so it was reasonable to assume a fairly large number of people would view your ad, regardless of whether it applied to them or not. Then they could decide at that point whether or not your marketing was speaking to them. So your large advertising budget, applied across a broad audience, a small fraction of which would become new business for you, perhaps even enough to justify the advertising budget.

Today is obviously much different. Thanks to the self-publishing world, there are now podcasts and the like that compete for radio audiences. YouTube channels, Vimeo and many others take their own share of television viewers, and the sheer dizzying array of mediums with which to consume written content is beyond count.

For the consumer, this means more than choice than ever. It means you can quickly find other people out there who collect fishing lures with as fervour as you do. It means you can find a YouTube cooking channel that satisfies your paleo dietary requirements. This is absolutely wonderful, in many ways. However as a business owner, this leaves you in a quandary. In the words of Seth Godin, “all media is now optional”. In other words, no one is going to engage in your status update, blog post, discussion, tweet or open your junk mail unless they want to.

Since this column is too short to really get into what you need to do to get people to engage in your content, I’ll leave you with some homework:

1. Understand the psychology behind social sharing – this generally involves knowing how to help your readers connect with others, knowing that readers need to trust you before sharing, and that KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) applies to your content, too!

2. Remove the friction behind sharing and engagement – in other words, given people buttons that make it easy to put your content on other channels.

3. Use images to stand out and get more social impressions but please! Keep it authentic. A stock photo of a woman wearing a telephone headset is so 1990…! Use your own images so that you are telling a truthful story.

4. Learn what time of day/week your content is generally consumed and schedule your posts/newsletters/tweets accordingly. Every platform has some kind of “insights” that contain pretty graphs describing everything you need to know about who is looking at your stuff and when.

Something to think about when you want to get your useful/entertaining/informative content out there…Happy posting!

5 things you can do to get you started on Twitter

Following on the heels of my first article in this column, I want to go straight into some practical tips that you can use in your business, like starting today.

Most people unfamiliar with Twitter shudder when I mention it. It’s a scary thing; the little tweet button that, once clicked, will send your thoughts to a….void? Judgemental audience? Viral post? How do you even know what to say that’s worthy of some stranger’s attention?

I had the same trepidation when I first started back in 2012. I certainly wasn’t an early adopter, so the Twitterverse was already well alive and kicking. How could I be sure I had anything to offer that hadn’t already been said? A few months before joining I was browsing the marketing section in the St. Thomas library and a title caught my eye: The UnMarketing Book by Scott Stratten. Picking it up, I went home and learned from just about the best there is in the Twitter business. Scott Stratten is a Canadian who jumped on the bandwagon in its early days and quickly realized the advantages that Twitter can bring any business, in any industry.

Instead of paying huge sums of money for focus groups or consumer data, each and every company has its customer’s opinions at its fingertips. Rather than cringing when you get your first customer complaint on Twitter, why not take advantage of this direct message to you and your company about how it is viewed by the public? Particularly the public who cared enough to even talk about you, whether the comment was positive or negative? This is Stratten’s general premise as to how a company can use this unique time and place to correspond one-on-one with its customers; something that’s never been possible before.

I also liked that Stratten made the foray into using Twitter much less intimidating for me: he suggests thinking of it like a party, where you go from room to room, having a quick conversation with one person here, then another there. You can choose to follow a conversation or thread, or leave it. No one will notice one way or another, but of course, the longer you stay, the more you will have a shared experience with others involved.

So where to start? The first five steps are easy: 1) Sign up. 2) Pick a username (called a “handle”, the thing with the “@” proceeding it in a tweet). 3) Put up a photo and 4) add a blurb about you. Your network will grow more quickly if people know you and your “context”. Then 5) begin by simply following other people. Local community leaders, politicians, and people who inspire you are a great place to start. For fun, add your favourite sports figures, comedians, or entertainers. Your child’s school and your workplace will almost certainly have a twitter account.

When you are ready to start tweeting but don’t know if you yet have anything original to say, begin by simply replying to other’s tweets. Hashtags are helpful clues to following a particular trend on Twitter, and when you start using it for business, this will become important. But in the early stages, you will really just need to get a feel for which party you feel like joining, and which ones you can skip out early.

Happy Tweeting!

#girlboss

Running your own business means learning as you go. To that end, I’ve read many books, on varied topics, from self-marketing to design inspiration to colour theory. Some of the most memorable books I’ve read have been written by women. I’ve selected three favourites below and I hope this might spur you on to further reading:

My original training was in electrical engineering, which was and still is a fairly male-dominated field. In the past, this would pose a problem for women as they may have suffered chauvinism and harassment in a gender-unbalanced workplace. But by the time I was in postsecondary school, I found the doors and barriers to be wide-open: my classmates and professors treated all of us as equals, and despite my being one of only 8 females out of 80 students, our class was very much on equal footing. So if an unfair work environment is no longer common, then why the continued gender imbalance in male-dominated fields? The Sexual Paradox by Susan Pinker explores one theory. She writes that now that women have fought for so long to remove the glass ceiling, it turns out the majority of females don’t think of a career as the only means to life fulfillment. It is normal – indeed common – for highly educated women to scale back their professions once they begin having children. So even though the race is now pretty equal in many ways, it turns out it’s not a race many women want to join. Part of her reasoning is that even though the workplace is no longer openly hostile to women, there is a still a fair amount of unconscious gender discrimination and preference for male qualities as a measure for success that continue to put women at a disadvantage and sometimes the fight just doesn’t seem worth it.

Where Susan Pinker leaves off, Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg does a fantastic job of picking up. The COO of Facebook explores many facets of the current corporate climate and how it does a disservice to women, even men, of certain temperaments. That a man is praised, respected even, for his aggressive tendencies but a woman’s greatest asset is that she is “nice” certainly makes scaling the corporate ladder difficult for females. The push to work longer and harder rather than prioritize family just as much as the workplace also places further stress on anyone, but particularly women, who want to focus on their children during their formative years. Sandberg does a great job advocating very specific policy changes workplaces can implement immediately that can even out the playing field without having to resort to affirmative action.

The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine is just one of those books that EVERYONE has to read. Seriously; I texted the book cover to a friend of mine urging her to read it after I was only on page 45! Brizendine states that even though 99.5% of our DNA is the same between males and females, our hormone levels and when and how much we produce of them has anything and everything to do with how we maintain relationships, make decisions, and react during stress. She also points out that there is almost no clinical data on females (a colleague admitted they never use female animals during studies because menstruation would make things more complicated), and yet there is so much valuable information to gain when understanding the differences between the sexes.

So, if you are interested in learning more about women in business, these titles should do a great job of getting you started. Happy reading!

The Connection Economy is changing how we do business

You may have looked around you and thought: how has so-and-so managed to get their business up and running so quickly? Why do they have customers lining up outside their doors? They don’t have a radio spot, they don’t have a two-page spread in the yellow pages, and I have yet to see a billboard with their logo on it!!

The answer is both simple and yet subtly complex, and it’s been called “The Connection Economy”.

Seth Godin, the author who coined the term, is a well-known guru in the era of digital marketing, and he has a lot of great things to say on the topic. One idea he presents is that we are moving away from an industrial economy towards a connection economy, that is, one where there is a human interaction at the heart of every business. 

He posits that our labour and material production has reached the limits of scalability, and that we have branded ourselves to death. So what does the world need? An economy routed in trust, permission, remarkability, leadership, storytelling, humanity, connection, compassion and humility.

But what does that mean in simple terms as someone who is running a business?

Your job as a modern business owner is to find the right tribe, connect and create a culture of being that tribe. Make your product or service so great that people will happily sing their praises of you on their Facebook update, tweet, or in an Instagram post. Word will spread; but the integrity and dedication to your product has to start with you.

Another way to look at the same problem is to ask yourself this question: Are you invisible or remarkable? Again, using Seth Godin’s voice, in an interview he gave to the blog Craft of Marketing (craftofmarketing.com):

“Basically what happens is people come to me knowing I don’t do consulting. So they’re looking for free advice, and they ask,

• “How do I make a big splash?”

• “How do I get the word out?”

• “How do I get to the size that you are?

• “Please write a post or tell me how to get my Kickstarter to be super successful, or whatever.”

My answer is from my own experience, the way I did it, which is to tell ten people. If those ten people tell no one else, then there’s something wrong with what you built. But if they tell other people, then the word begins to spread. And if you show up, day after day with something important, and notable, and remarkable, and generous, people will talk about it. They will miss you if you are gone. And that is the slow and steady route to actually making an impact, that I know of.”

…Invisible or Remarkable? My column here will take a closer look at what this might mean for you as a local business owner in Elgin County. I can’t wait to get started!

Introducing Modern Marketing: The Connection Economy

Back in 2005 in Ottawa when I launched my graphic design career, I started the usual way: building a portfolio piece by piece by getting work from friends or close colleagues. This makes perfect sense for a novice starting out: you don’t yet have a strong portfolio or network, and therefore you need to build some credibility. This was also before the age of social media, and so my reach was very much local. As I completed more and more projects successfully, word got around and my “word-of-mouth” referrals grew.

Eventually I started getting calls from colleagues or friends of friends, and the project would typically begin with a telephone call. In fact, I realized more often than not, I wasn’t even meeting the client I would work with! The nature of a creative business that mainly relies on software and the internet to accomplish tasks means you can really take your work literally anywhere. So, I stretched myself out and started looking online for contracts, eventually landing repeating work like annual reports for university departments based in Calgary, and campaign projects for the city of Winnipeg. Using early online freelance websites like Guru (contemporary sites are now “Upwork” and “Fiverr”) allowed me to stretch beyond the borders of my hometown with ease.

This is the new reality for many small businesses. You no longer have to rely on a personal sales call or project meeting to get the job done. With the help of Skype, Facetime, Google Hangouts, or the like, you can virtually be in a room with anyone, anywhere. Thanks to screen sharing apps like ScreenLeap or Join.Me, I can train clients on how to use their newly built website, collaborate on a moodboard, or review a document. Document sharing platforms like Dropbox or Google Drive make sharing large files easy, a must for the type of files I use daily. For my own business development, I rarely find myself in a brick-and-mortar classroom and instead will use Lynda.com or Udemy to delve into skills that are often so cutting-edge the local colleges don’t yet even offer courses on the topic.

When we moved to St. Thomas in 2009, I took all my Ottawa clients with me. They were all happy to continue working the same way we had before; only now, we could compare the weather between Southwestern and Eastern Ontario. Even today, I still work with some of these Ottawa clients. Another portion of my business comes from anywhere from the Toronto area (where I can compete favourably as my overhead is much lower than creative agencies operating there) to even far-flung American cities. And of course, a significant chunk of work still comes from old-fashioned face-to-face networking in London and St. Thomas. You can’t underestimate the power of the human connection, but it’s no longer the only way to play the game. Whether you sell insurance, vintage doilies or reclaimed wood furniture: the job can be done from anywhere. You just need a website and a solid social media presence. The online world awaits!

Eyes on the prize!

I get to choose my hours! I don’t have to listen to anyone barking orders at me! I can do what I love, every single day! I can finally be appreciated for my talents and hard work! When you daydream about owning your business, I’ll bet these thoughts swim through your head as you picture yourself swiveling in your office chair, your name on the sign outside, proud owner of your very own establishment.

…Of course, that is *mostly* true. I started my own graphic design firm because I wanted flexible hours in order to be the dominant care-giver while my children were young. I ultimately make every decision about what direction my business will take, day to day. And I do do what I love, at least most of the day.

But the realities of owning your own business also poses some issues that I think most people don’t consider when they set out down the entrepreneurial path. Choose your own hours? Do you think I turn down a job just because it happens to be a rush project that falls on the weekend, and the sun is out? Heck no! I don’t know if next month is going to be slower than this month so when a client says “jump!” I definitely say “how high?”

Being the boss of a company where you directly interact with clients or customers every day means listening to them and their concerns, and ultimately making sure they are thrilled with your work or product. This doesn’t always mean deciding how and when to do things. My projects with clients are very much a collaborative process. They are informed by both my creative design, my marketing experience AND the need for the client to make money, so I can hardly sit back and just do what I feel like.

The ultimate eye-opener for most people who set out to work for themselves is that, sure, you get to do what you love most of the time, but you are also the customer service department, accounting, and marketing, all rolled into one. This means that sometimes as much as 50% of your day can be swallowed up by “non-work” work. In truth, I’ve enjoyed the learning curve in some of these areas but not every business owner is happy about interacting with a wide variety of personalities every day or the mundane task of having to keep track of gas receipts.

Possibly the biggest lesson I’ve learned about owning my own business for the last 12 years is that it really helps if you stay focused on your passion. You can be so busy with the day to day that you forget to pop your head up once in a while to redirect your ship to ensure it is still heading toward the horizon you’ve envisioned for yourself. As Gary Vaynerchuk, entrepreneurial internet millionaire declares: “Passion is an unmatched fuel. Add being happy to that and you have a wonderful formula for good health.” Eyes on the prize!