Inbound Marketing Versus Outbound Marketing

One of the latest buzzwords is inbound marketing, which is contrasted with outbound marketing.  Outbound marketing is the old traditional approach which is to ensure that people will see your advertisements and messages by spending large sums of money to get their attention.

Inbound marketing on the other hand has become a two-way dialogue, much of which is played out in social media such as Facebook or even Twitter.

Inbound marketing focuses on earning, not buying, a person’s attention, which is done through social media and engaging content, such as blogs, podcasts and white papers. This content is interesting, informative and adds value, creating a positive connection in the eyes of the consumer, thus making her more likely to engage your brand and buy the product

The link above shows an infographic created by Voltier Digital, which highlights the differences between the two kinds of marketing.  Here is the lead-in to that infographic.  The infographic is of course another device used in inbound marketing to earn the viewers interest.

Inbound Marketing Is The Future

The term Inbound Marketing was created by Hubspot and they are persuasive on its merits as the way of the future.

Instead of interrupting people with television ads, they create videos that potential customers want to see. Instead of buying display ads in print publications, they create their own business blog that people subscribe to and look forward to reading. Instead of cold calling, they create useful content and tools so that prospects contact them looking for more information.

Instead of driving their message into a crowd over and over again like a sledgehammer, they attract highly qualified customers to their business like a magnet.

Companies Should Look In Before Looking Out

That  all sounds fine but others are raising a warning that getting involved with social media may be opening a can of worms.  Social media are just that: social.  Whatever surfaces is there (for ever) for all the world to see.

The advice here is to look inwards and make sure that there are no skeletons in the cupboard.  Products and services should be ones that customers find satisfactory and indeed might wish to recommend to their friends.  Only when a company is operating at this level can you expect that individuals in social media such as Facebook may share details of new promotions with their friends in a way which will be helpful to your future growth targets..

The Outside In Look Is The Best

Looking inwards is fine but we would urge you to go one step further.  The important view of the products and services is not what company employees believe but more importantly what customers and potential customers may believe.

They are on the outside looking in.  They also compare your products and services with similar offerings from the competition.  It is worth investing time and effort in getting honest feedback from potential customers as to how your products and services really stack up against the competition.  For over ten years, this approach has been around and sometimes is labeled being customer-centric.

Perhaps even better is to listen to those dissatisfied customers and hear what they have to say about the company and its products and services.  They are certainly on the outside looking in but they may provide the most honest appraisals you will get.

People in general do not like to complain and there is also the factor of cognitive dissonance.  When someone has bought a product they may not choose to comment on slight dissatisfactions they may feel because they really want the world to know that they were astute purchasers.  Those who decided not to buy may give much more revealing comments.

Certainly that outside in look may well teach you something about your products and services that you had never realized.  With that information you can be on a path to improvement and to success.  Without that information you may be attempting the impossible in getting potential customers to test out your products.

Post from: BPWrap

Inbound Marketing and Marketing Outside In

Technorati Tags: Facebook, hubspot, inbound marketing, Outside.in

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A Marshmallow Challenge might seem to be an unlikely topic for this blog, but it is a topic on today’s Ted Blog that is amusing and stimulating.  It is a talk by Tom Wujec and it is all about collaboration, innovation and creativity.  He is a Fellow at Autodesk and is the creator of the marshmallow challenge.

He describes it as one of the fastest and most powerful techniques for teams to improve their capacity to generate fresh ideas, build rapport, and master the skill of prototyping – all of which lie at the heart of team innovation.

The challenge is disarmingly simple.  The teams get 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of masking tape, one yard of string and one marshmallow.  The rules are straightforward:

1. Build the Tallest Freestanding Structure: The winning team is the one that has the tallest structure measured from the table top surface to the top of the marshmallow. That means the structure cannot be suspended from a higher structure, like a chair, ceiling or chandelier.
2. The Marshmallow Must be on Top: The entire marshmallow needs to be on the top of the structure. Cutting or eating part of the marshmallow disqualifies the team. 
3. Use as Much or as Little of the Kit: The team can use as many or as few of the 20 spaghetti sticks, as much or as little of the string or tape. The team cannot use the paper bag as part of their structure.
4. Break up the Spaghetti, String or Tape: Teams are free to break the spaghetti, cut up the tape and string to create new structures.
5. The Challenge Lasts 18 minutes: Teams must not be holding on to the structure when the time runs out. Teams holding the structure will be disqualified.

If you explore the website, you will see some of the creative solutions that teams have used around the world.

This post is also a challenge in another way.  Like the other SMM blogs, this blog is currently structured according to the LMNHP (Look Mom No Home Page) approach.  It is early days and the key measure of how useful this approach is will come from rankings of posts in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). 

The Marshmallow Challenge has produced no less than 390,000 items and the TED blog post today will encourage many more.  It will be interesting to see, given that competition, how high this blog post can rise for a Google search for ‘Marshmallow Challenge’.  We will keep you posted.

Post from: BPWrap

The Marshmallow Challenge

Technorati Tags: challenge, creativity, lmnhp, marshmallow, team

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That message is to be found in a Business Interview in The Hindu: Hard-edged diagnostic of business is critical in a downturn. The Four Laws in the book, ‘Breakthrough Imperative – How the Best Managers achieve outstanding results’, are fundamental.

• Costs and prices always decline.
• Competitive position determines options.
• Customers and profit pools don’t stand still.
• Simplicity gets results.

Mr Mark A. Gottfredson, a co-author of the book, and a Partner in Bain & Company, Inc., US, affirms that the Four Laws are timeless concepts that work in economic boom times and in times of downturns. A performance improvement diagnostic using the four laws will identify the key imperatives for surviving the downturn and for gaining advantage as the market turns back up.

The Four Laws in a way reflect a view on what is happening around and outside the company.  The Balanced Scorecard approach (bsc) suggests that the organization should consider its strategy with respect to four key dimensions, rather than only the Financial dimension.  These dimensions are:

• Financial
• Customer
• Learning and growth and
• Internal processes

A do­wn­t­ur­n­ bsc  forces a­ mo­re h­o­listic view­ o­f­ p­erf­o­rma­n­ce as o­rga­n­iz­a­tio­n­s develo­p­ a­n­d review­ their stra­tegic o­bj­ectives, rather than just adopting a shedding-assets and cutting costs approach.  Taking the right corrective actions in line with your recession scorecard  means that the organization will be in the best possible shape once the recession passes. 

Weaker competitors who do not adopt this downturn scorecard approach will either not survive or will have fallen back in their competitivity.  The Chinese curse says, ‘May you live in interesting times’.  Provided you take the right steps that curse can signal an opportunity.

Post from: BPWrap

Business Performance Management During Crises And Recessions

Technorati Tags: balanced scorecard, bsc, four laws, recession

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Firefox 3.0 Looks Much Better Full Screen. That was written by Geoff Fox of PC Magazine and I think he has got it exactly right.

If you are a Firefox user and have upgraded to Firefox 3.0, then just hit that F11 key to see what he means. If you are working with a 1024 x 768 screen, then the effect is particularly good. The whole screen is taken up with the window content of the webpage you were visiting. If the page is particularly long, then you may have a scrollbar down the right-hand side. The rest is exactly what that website owner was hoping you would see. There are no toolbars along the top or a status bar along the bottom. It is all just visual content.

If you do wish to see which tabs are open, then just move your mouse to the top of the screen and the tab bar will appear. If you were working with the Navigation toolbar visible, then this toolbar will also appear at the top above the tab bar. All the other toolbars you may have had visible still remain hidden in this Full Screen view.

If you are hooked on having these bars permanently visible along the top, then Percy Cabello has some advice for you on how to Tweak Firefox 3 full screen mode. That will make the tabs and navigation toolbar a permanent visible item in your Firefox 3 Full Screen mode.

I very much prefer keeping that clean simple look. Indeed by an approach that I am about to describe, I will suggest to you how you can stay in Full Screen mode probably 95 percent of the time. I work fairly extensively on the Internet. However if I analyze my behavior on any given day, I am probably working within a very restricted list of web pages or URLs. The problem is that from a Full Screen mode webpage, I cannot access my Bookmarks Toolbar.

I raised this problem with my colleagues on the Cre8Asite Forums, in a topic which was titled Maximizing The View Window. There was a suggestion that the Bookmarks or Favorites could be put on a web page. This in turn raised the possibility that such a HTML file could be held on my local computer, which gives the most rapid and reliable access. The following image shows some of the final product. It’s a Demo version of my new computer-resident Home Page.

With what is there, I can work most of the time in the Full Screen version and rarely need to put all those toolbars back. You can download it, if you wish to check the code or modify it to create your own, from this link: Home Page Links Demo.

Some of the features you will note are the clock at the top right, a Google search field and a Quote Of The Day. Below that arranged in a table are some of the links I use for much of the day. When working for a specific client, I often add a few links that are specific to that client.

For those who are novices with HTML, it is a very simple matter to modify the code to remove or add a link. You just open the homepagelinksdemo.htm file in Notepad or something equivalent that can handle text files. The HTML code for a table entry looks like the following:
<td><a href="http://www.mysite.com/">My Site</a></td>
To change the link, put the new URL between the ” ” and add the appropriate name between the > and <.

When using such a Home Page, it really becomes very handy if you arrange that opening a new tab shows that Home Page. This can be achieved by using the New Tab Homepage 0.4 Firefox Add-on.

If you wish to select a link on this Home Page, <control>T opens up a new tab with the Home Page showing. Clicking on a link on that Home Page opens the URL in the same tab. Throughout you are working Full Screen. If you no longer want that web page, <control>W will close that tab.

I’m finding this increases my effectiveness and viewing pleasure significantly. Try your own local Home Page and perhaps you will be equally impressed. Unfortunately a similar set-up does not work so smoothly for Internet Explorer. The security features blocking ActiveX controls prevents single click opening of new web pages. Often two clicks are required to remove the blocking feature. The only sensible suggestion for Internet Explorer users is to switch to Firefox.

Post from: BPWrap

Ultimate Simplicity For Firefox 3 Full Screen

Technorati Tags: 1024x768, display, Firefox, full screen, Home Page

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There are many other blogs that are not so profitable. Blogging software is freely available, domains and hosting services are cheap and programs like Google AdSense can generate income without requiring any special efforts. The blogosphere is full of such blogs created solely to generate AdSense revenue. They provide little service to readers and minimal revenue to the owners.

There are shining exceptions to this, as San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer, Sam Zuckerman, points out (tip of the hat to Techmeme). Here are some short excerpts from his article:

The economics of blogging is so strong that entrepreneurs often can self-finance, which lets them tell potential investors to take a hike. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington said he’s walked away from venture capital deals four separate times.

“Every time we almost did a round (of financing), we grew so fast the terms didn’t make sense anymore,” he said.

The emerging business model is to start by selling advertising and build from there with events, subscriptions or product sales. And with audiences growing at double- or triple-digit rates, ad prices are soaring for top blogs.

“When we started selling advertising in this space late in 2005, it was very experimental and risky. We were able to get maybe $4 or $5″ per 1,000 page views, John Battelle, owner of Federated Media Publishing, a sort of uberblog, selling advertising and carrying out business functions for a stable of 130 independent blogs said. “For the same impressions we were selling then, we are now on average $20 to $30.”

The economics of blogging is ideal with low fixed overheads and the variable cost of writers is often low. Startups do not involve massive investments with long delayed revenues. With creative ideas that appeal to the right niche market, low-cost promotional efforts can start an exponential growth in visitor traffic. All it takes is passion and persistence.

Related:
Blog Networks Bringing Home the Bacon
Blog Networks become profitable (weren’t they always?)

Post from: BPWrap

Blogging Can Be Very Profitable

Technorati Tags: TechCrunch

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Customer Service is one of the most important functions in any company. That is where you get the reality check on how good the products and services your company provides really are. That’s the central theme of an article in the April Newsletter from FreePint. If you don’t read the FreePint monthly newsletter, I would highly recommend it. This article is entitled, “Tough Love: Excelling at Customer Service Is Not Just One Big Happy-Clappy Hugfest“, and it’s written by Robbie Frazer of Prenax.

It’s an excellent read, but a short quote will give you one of the themes:

Customer service was all about being warm and fuzzy, peopled by friendly types who wore distressed jeans at client meetings and drank carrot juice for breakfast.

That’s the storybook idea of customer service, and it doesn’t work. Sometimes, treating your customers right hurts.

My point is that there are rock-solid reasons why a company should champion its people, really care about its customers and create a culture where customer service is central to everything. And those reasons are not all joss sticks and dungarees, but hard business motives that sometimes need very tough decisions to be made: to create this service culture where people take pride in their customer relations and generally seem to be enjoying work takes some effort.

Frazer also gets into the topic of the oh-so common tendency of trying to cut costs on customer service. That reminded me of what the old farmer said about his mule. “I was teaching my mule to live on less and less food. He’d just about learned the trick when he upped and died.”

In this Internet age, the customer is even more in control than ever. Some companies realize that and are giving better service. It’s a way of developing a competitive advantage since the majority of companies are into the cost-cutting mode. Surprisingly some of the worst at providing customer service are the telephone companies. Just think of your own experience. Having to key in your account number and then repeat it to a human agent is all too common. They should be experts in handling voice communications.

Luckily help is now available. Intelligent Voice Response (IVR) from companies like Crimsonet can handle your call as well as the best-trained customer service representative. As it happens, it’s cheaper as well but the main driver will certainly be the improved customer service that results. It’s so much better than the (un)Intelligent Voice Response that some people encounter.

Post from: BPWrap

Customer Service Needs Tough Love

Technorati Tags: customer service, IVR

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One of the best little gizmos in some time has now been added to BPWrap. I’d seen it before but it was a post about AnswerTips on A VC Blog that pointed out it could be added to any web page. You now can see the small button to signal its presence here at the top of the column to the right. I’m sure it will be most appreciated by those who occasionally see a word where they’re not sure of the definition. To get an AnswerTip from Answers.com just double-click on the word that is puzzling you. It won’t work if the word is within a text hyperlink. A small window opens up to give information on the word and you just close it when you’ve finished. You don’t have to go anywhere else.

It works a treat. It even picks up the context in associated words. I double-clicked on the word ‘walled’ in an article that was talking about ‘walled gardens’. The AnswerTip was on walled gardens: I was most impressed. So impressed that it will be added to the other SMM blogs and to the most recent SMM Newsletters.

Try it out for yourself. I will be interested in any comments you care to leave here on these AnswerTips. Please note that the gizmo has since then been removed in an upgrade of the websites. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Footnote: This post only goes to confirm the way one can keep on the leading edge by monitoring RSS news feeds. After posting, I had an e-mail from Gina Larson to alert me to today’s launch of AnswerTips, which had been tested in a beta version by among others A VC Blog. This was because of my prior post on one of their other products, BrainBoost. If you want more details, check the complete media release from Answers.com.

Related: Answer.com or www.Answer.com For Answers

Post from: BPWrap

AnswerTips Comes To BPWrap, Courtesy of Answers.com

Technorati Tags: Answer.com, Answers

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The article is all about when you start doing something. The same concern for time is often important when you stop doing something. Perhaps the person you are involved with has another engagement to get to. Perhaps someone else is waiting to use the ‘equipment’ you’re using, whether it be a conference room or an exercise machine.

The most important end time of all is the time when you told the customer that the product would arrive or the new system would be running successfully. Many suppliers seem unaware of how important time of delivery is to most customers. It’s a very visible sign of the total quality being delivered. Even when there are no adverse economic effects of a late delivery, it’s still late. The customer is waiting. It’s even worse if they’ve not had news on why the delay is occurring.

That’s the downside of time associated with a product or service. If you deliver late, then the product/service is just that much less satisfactory than it might have been. There can be an upside to time. You can turn it into a distinguishing mark of your products and services. Delivering on time or even ahead of time is so unusual that you’ll really stand out from the crowd. I remember a very rich Norwegian lawyer friend of mine. He was very successful in the early days of the North Sea gas finds. On most issues he had a 48-hour turn round policy. Whoever heard of a lawyer who reliably delivers answers and documents within two days? What a great USP (Unique Selling Proposition). He left the competition trailing in the dust. It certainly worked very well for him.

In some ways, it’s one of the easiest features that you can build into a product. Yet what an enormous benefit it will be to many customers. There are no worries that it may arrive late, when you buy from ABC Corp. All it takes is some planning and making sure that the resources are there to do the job on time. Most importantly the whole team must have the enthusiasm and commitment to deliver the product on or before the promised time.

So don’t just be on time to avoid being rude. Be on time because it’s one of the easiest ways of delivering an important benefit to your customers. If you do, they’ll probably tell their friends about it too. So it’s a win/win situation.

Related: Time Is Critical

Tags: time

Post from: BPWrap

Late Is Rude And Customers Notice

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One of the most useful phrases in business is, “You can only manage what you can measure.” It’s a very demanding and challenging phrase. A new forum was added to the Cre8asite Forums a few months back. “Measuring Your Success” it’s called. The Cre8asite Forums aim to “Build Better Websites Together”. So is success the best indicator of whether you’ve achieved what you set out to do.

Any word can only be assessed in terms of how people in general use it. So what is success? If something is a success, then you may well break out the champagne and have a party. It’s almost an all-or-nothing thing. You have it, or you have a failure: or perhaps it’s so-so. So can you really measure success on some kind of scale. Can you really manage success?

Is there some other parameter that will allow us to manage our websites better? It seems to me that ‘Performance’ is exactly the word we’re looking for. Performance has a whole host of associations that work well, particularly considering the sports analogy. Setting goals, measuring, analysis, training, practice, improvement, achievement – they’re all there.

pushes the same message for businesses in general. Here is what they currently say on their Home Page: “High performance is about closing the gap between what a company is achieving and what it has the potential to achieve.”

So in our Internet Marketing, let’s not go with that over-simplification involved in the word, Success. Let’s rather look to our Performance and see how we can make it the best that it can be.

Post from: BPWrap

Performance Pronounced Success

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This can be contrasted with a thread in the Cre8asite Forums entitled, “Marketing Success“. This discusses the importance of publishing on the Web as a way to business success. However there is a dissenting voice from one who had found it worked better to publish less. The member, brandboerge from Denmark, made the following comment about the time when he published more and got little work from that, “I guess they thought they could do the work themselves… and maybe they could?”

So what’s the answer? I’m certainly in the publishing camp and believe it has a very positive result. Like so many important questions it comes down to one of those 2 x 2 tables that I’m so fond of. Here’s the appropriate one in this case:

Clearly those in the D.I.Y. row, who enjoy doing it all themselves, whether or not they have the budget, will never buy services. However they will appreciate the articles and may create a minor, secondary effect in being part of increased traffic to the website and perhaps clicking on PPC ads, if such there are. As Bill said, they may feel they too should contribute to the exchange of knowledge, so we’re all richer for that.

The upper row is the more interesting from the business perspective. Those in the B% have no money to use for services. So like the D.I.Y.ers, the only benefit if any is a secondary effect.

The interesting cell is that A% of the audience, who have the budget and will use good help. Hopefully what you publish will convince them you can provide that good help.

The $ 24,000 question is how big is the A%. Large enough, I believe, to cover anyone’s business aspirations. There are three major reasons for that:
1. Internet Marketing has a huge potential for creating sales growth in all markets, almost without exception.
2. Internet Marketing can appear easy, but it’s also easy to get it wrong. Good business articles will give you the most important principles to get right. Without these you’re dead in the water. However beyond that, there are many small things to get right. You can learn about these by trial and error but it’s very costly and slow. The Internet is changing and evolving all the time and it is important to stay on top of all important developments. Few business people have the time to invest in this, nor should they.
3. In addition to having extra skilled resources to complement your own team, it’s alway good to have an outside perspective. If an Internet marketing consultant is good, he or she will tell you the tough stuff that your own employees may not have the guts to comment on. More importantly, different viewpoints can promote intense creativity. 2 plus 2 may make 22.

So I’m with Bill Slawski on this one.

Post from: BPWrap

To Inform or Not To Inform? That is the question.

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