Marketing Blog

July 7, 2016 By Travis Baker

Trade Show Calculator: How Many People Should Work Your Booth

I have gotten push back from C-level on why we need so many people on the trade show floor. If you have ever organized a trade show you probably have as well. That’s why we created a trade show calculator. The push back usually sounds like this….

What are they doing?! Just hanging out and eating dinner on the company?! They should be out doing (insert whatever they should be doing).

This is my response,

You are making a huge investment having the show to begin with. The concrete alone costs thousands of dollars. Yes,it is an added expense to have good coverage. But know this.

Working a trade show booth is hard work that requires concentration and alertness.

You have to be on and going for every minute of your time there, or you may lose out. You are standing on your feet for hours. ( I buy all the pad they will give me and it still excruciating). People need breaks in order to have a high-level of alertness.

If your people aren’t at 100% how much is that costing you?

Your employees are hopefully meeting with prospects which takes them off the floor, they are pushing people further down the sales funnel.

But that can still be a tough sell.

So I created this tool to help you back up and the number of booth attendees you need. Notice, I did not say want, how many people you need.

Get the Show Attendee Calculator

Now you can back up the number of attendees with math.

And guess what? It is adaptable. For different industries and different setups and different shows.

If you are in an industry that has product you are displaying you can manipulate the square footage. You can change the expected visitors.

You can make this tool your own and win those arguments.With Math! My hated enemy. My usual response to math is,”I am in marketing you do the math.” But now with the help of this handy-dandy tool you don’t have to!

June 29, 2016 By Travis Baker

Why Your About Page Sucks

What’s the second most visited page after your homepage? Take a guess.

Give up?

Your About page. Wow, cool! People must be really interested in you, right?

Nope. Nobody cares.

Really. Despite all of the clicks on your about page.

I think the problem is the name. People care about what you can do for them, not about your company.

And I know that’s hard to hear, because your company is so awesome!

And don’t get me wrong your product is cool, but people don’t buy because your product looks awesome or is a neat toy, they buy it because it solves their problems.

Most companies squander the opportunity to tell how your company can solve a problem. Instead they tell people about how Uncle Jethro founded this company in 19-dixety-six. He traded the onion tied to his belt for a rack or whatever the story is…..

So here is a better plan.

First step: Figure out your customer’s problem. You can be as narrow about this or as broad as you want. Is the problem throughput or do they need to decrease the cost per order shipped?

What is your customer’s pain? Now make that your introduction on your about page. This is what grabs your prospect and get them to read further.

Ok, second step: How do you solve their problem?

What can you do for them? That’s what you need to demonstrate on your about page. It’s “about” how you can solve their problem.

A great way to do that is take what you did for customer X and demonstrate a way that will solve something for prospect Y.

You can do that from a short excerpt of a case study, a video or whatever. The key is to make it relatable to other companies that face the same issue.

Perhaps, a testimonial from another customer about what you did for them and concrete results. When you talk about your product or solution talk it about it from a benefit side. Don’t name what your product does, name the problems that it solves.

Final Step: A way to get in contact with you. Heck, there are lots of ways to get in contact with you. Your phone number, a button for your your email, a contact page, a button linking to your Linkedin.

Want some more info about how to step up your marketing? Download our Actionable Marketing Tactics E-book.

June 21, 2016 By Travis Baker

3 Reasons Building Your Website on a CMS Rocks

Man, remember the old days when your website was pretty much set in stone? If you made a mistake on the initial content it meant a call to the website designer, wait 24 hours see the change, decide that it is not exactly right, change again and then wait another 24 hours?

Oh and then you get the bill?

Yeah that’s irritating.

Wouldn’t it be better if after the designer was done building your website you could make all the “small changes” yourself?

That’s why we build all of our websites on a CMS or content management system. We use WordPress, because it is very flexible (and I like it), but there are lot of other CMS’s out there that you can use.

So for your next website design make sure your designer build on a CMS, not just your blog or news page. The whole dang thing.

Agility: Let’s say you just added a new product and you need a place to send visitors to that explains your product. Let’s assume you already have your strategy for the product in place. All you need to do is get the page up.

It is much more effective to have someone on your staff (or you) add the page then have your designer do it.

First, the designer often has other projects in the pipeline and might not be able to address it right then.

Second, let’s say that your new product is so popular that is on back-order. Instead of dealing with fallout from unhappy customers you can immediately make the change to the page alerting any visitors to the delay.

Cost Effective: I don’t think it is much of a stretch to convince you that is much more cost effective for you to make a small change or addition on your site then to have you developer do it.

Most web developers have a minimum change fee, or hourly charge. Wouldn’t it be better that you changed it for nothing?

Power: {Insert evil laughter} Just kidding, but not really. If you have the power of your site in your hands, that is just one more advantage over your competitors. You can respond just a quickly as you could on social media, but on your home site.

Good deal, right?

So consider using a CMS for your next website. If you would like to talk about your website design project please give us a call and let’s talk.

June 14, 2016 By Travis Baker

Winning Customers by Being Likeable

It’s an old adage of business, people buy from people they like. It’s not the only variable, of course, but it sure does help.

And that’s great for sales or other roles where you are out interacting and building a relationship, but how do you get people to like you who have never met you?

How do we do that in our marketing? Where you don’t have a lot of face-to-face interactions?

That is a little bit harder.

But we have a few ways to interact with people, right? For instance your website, social media, your blog.

There are lots of ways to build rapport and show people what an awesome, likable pleasure you are to work with.

So what do people look for in people they like? Well, I like people who are authentic, trustworthy and helpful.

Let’s explore how that happens in marketing, when people can’t interact with my sparkling personality in person.

Authentic: If you have read even one of my blog articles or visited my website, you kind of know what you are getting. I try to act like a person in my communication (weird, I know) and to interject humor into the situation. When you meet me in person you know what you get?

Yep, the same thing.

Now, not everybody likes that? But what is the point of wasting time presenting myself as one thing when the second they meet me they are going to realize that I am not “how they thought I would be.” That is a lost sale every time. A fancy way to say this is it is brand dissonance.

Trustworthy: A lot falls under trustworthy, but I think it can be summed us as saying what you are going to do and then doing it. People like people that they can rely on.

If you say your content download is valuable, make it valuable. If you say you only email people when it is important don’t spam them every other day.

With one caveat.

I am huge fan of under-promising and over-delivering. It is a simple and easy way to delight people. If someone tells me they will have a project complete on Monday and I receive it 24 hours sooner, I am one happy camper.

If you tell me you can do something and then you complete it early, or cheaper, I am never going to argue with that.

Helpful: I genuinely want to help people build their business. It is important to me. I think that people can sense whether you are into something for a check or you really want to help them.

And I want to work with people who help me. That’s why if I see something on social media that “Hey I am looking for a good printer”, I tell them about my friend Ken. How great he is even with my off-the-wall request. Like I need 50 14-foot magnetized banners.

I don’t care if I ever become the posters partner (well, maybe I care a little), but still I helped. I like being helpful and people like helpful people.

If you are interested in working with someone who has the above traits give us a call. We know someone like that.

June 7, 2016 By Travis Baker

The Power of Your Website

Sometimes I talk to people about web development, who clearly could benefit from a website, and I get the oddest excuses for why they don’t need one.

Want to hear my favorite?

“We don’t need a new website because we have too many leads already.”

Yep, people say that. Often with a straight face.

“Really? You have too many leads already? Then why are you here with me eating overheated appetizers and drinking sub-par beer instead of on a boat in the Bahamas?”

But, OK let’s say that you do have “too many leads”.

That is not the only reason you need your site redesigned or even, gulp, need a site to begin with.

Want to know why you need a new website?

It is your face. You partners go to it, your suppliers go to it, your customers go to it. Do you want to look like you and your company is stuck in the early 90’s? Probably not.

Do you want your first interaction with a customer to happen via some random third party website, that doesn’t know your message or your audience?

No, you don’t. Perception is reality. Make your reality a little better.

Show expertise

Your website gives you a great place to share your thoughts and tell your story. You can illustrate what makes you different from your competitors. It enables you to let the all of your customers know how you can help them with their problems in their distribution center or warehouse.

Shorten your sales cycle

OK, you have too many leads now, but what about in the future. Some sales cycles take 3, 6, heck even 18 months! Wouldn’t it be nice to have some customers in your sales funnel already for when those possible lean times come around?

Target

Your website allows you to target the best leads for your business. Yes you maybe getting a “ton of leads” but what are those leads doing for you? Are they your ideal customers? Or are they people that you have to bend your solution to fit?

Are they in your geographic region that you can service easily, or are they 4 states away where you don’t have a presence?

Interested in talking about your website? Contact us.

May 18, 2016 By Travis Baker

Be Brave: Find Your Client’s Marketing Problem

People reach out to marketing companies in hopes that they will solve a marketing problem. However, there can often be a disconnect between what the client asks for and what they really want.

People say “We need a new website, we need new branding, we need better collateral.” Your client gets an idea and reaches out to you to solve their “need”.

Now the easy approach, which I think most of us take, is to sit back and be a good order taker. Set-up a quote and get to work. Start billing!

But as a more effective alternative, what if we asked. “What’s your problem? What do you really want to solve?”

Because frankly nothing is worse then a customer coming back 6 months or a year later complaining about how they didn’t get new leads.

Client: “Yeah, so we aren’t getting the leads we expected from your work.”

Me: “What’s that?”

Client: “Yeah, not really getting the results that we expected”.

Me: “Um, we did a brand redesign. Why did you think that was going to get you new leads?”

It was the tactic that they assumed they needed. The new leads were really what the client wanted as result of the brand redesign.

And that mistake is not on the customer, it is on me. I can’t just sit back and say, “Yes sir, Mr. customer, we will get right on that and just happily starting building, shipping or billing.”

I am supposed to be the expert in the field. I need to ask, “what are your goals with this project, what do you want to accomplish, what strategy is this supposed to support?”

And it’s easy not to do that extra step. My client is 60 percent down the sales path when they talk to me and know what they want. They may just have a preconceived notion on how to get there.

I need to make sure that I am getting to the real root of the problem and the real goal. It is our job as business owners and salespeople to make sure what we are selling fits our clients need.

Want to talk about what you really want from your marketing? Contact us and let’s chat.

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