Category Archives: Small Business

Marketing: 4 Scenarios for Hiring an Outside Consulting Resource

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The past couple of years have changed things in our modern work world quite a bit. Generation X was raised to believe that, if we just get an education and land a corporate job, we’d have security for years to come. Think again my friends, because those days are long gone.

With our economy running on life support, the dollar in the tank, and fast-rising inflation, companies had to pinch pennies wherever possible to keep the ship afloat. The results have been widespread and severe…significant loss of jobs, budgets slashed to levels we haven’t seen in years, and even a slew of companies going belly up during the prolonged recession.

Now we find ourselves with an unemployment rate higher than we’ve seen in at least couple of decades, if not longer. All companies want to do “more with less”. But business must go on, so we have to work within the current constraints placed before us.

As marketers, there comes a time when you have to consider outsourcing some or all of key programs. Let’s look at the most common situations where you should consider an outside consulting resource.

Work Overload

Doing more with less essentially means your company has decided to squeeze lemon juice out of a turnip, and you’re the turnip. Work/Life balance? Fat chance. This is typically a situation where the company has lopped off as many limbs as possible in hopes of surviving, and all of their work either goes away, or more likely, falls squarely on your “to-do” list. If you have been working so many hours that it takes more than a split second to remember your kid’s middle name or birthday, draw a line in the sand and sign up some help.

Missing Skillsets or Experience

I’ve spent a great deal of my career in startup environments, and there always comes a time when you need to do something that no one on the team has done before. There are two answers to this situation – invest your own valuable time and effort into figuring out how to band-aid a solution together, or pony up the dough to hire someone who already knows what they are doing. Having taken both approaches, I can speak from experience on this one. Bring in a consultant for the execution, and spend your valuable time working with them on fitting it into your overall strategy and vision.

Short-Term Needs or Projects

This is the situation where you most need to look outside. It’s one thing to have a new ongoing need, which is the only time you’d really want to invest the time and energy in ramping on a complex new skill. If you have a time-limited project where you need specialized technical or execution resources, save yourself the hassle, and budget for hiring some help. You can do a quick ROI analysis by taking your hourly rate, estimating how long you have to work to learn the skill, calculating how much slower you’d actually do it than an expert would, and comparing that to their quote. If you are still ROI positive, what other non-financial tradeoffs are you making, such as opportunity costs (i.e. other important projects that go into a queue instead of getting done), your stress level (and how that affects your ability to properly address other priorities), and whether you are getting enough time to recharge personally.

Building a “Virtual Support Team”

Maybe you’ve determined you do need to do a large volume of work, you are missing skillsets for managing the work, and you have frequent needs for short-term project assistance. Great! You may not be able to get a permanent job req for hiring new direct reports, but you can likely plan around setting budgets for your extended team. I’ve run entire virtual marketing groups myself by hiring outside professionals for web design, PPC strategy/execution, trade show support, writing, graphic design, etc. This is a valid and proven model, particularly in the startup world where you have to do the work of an army by yourself.

Conclusion

Your company may expect you to do the work of a small army, but is that truly reasonable? You can do financial calculations to justify outsourcing rather simply. Use those numbers as ammo to negotiate funding for outside help or to persuade the company to de-prioritize activities that aren’t worth the investment. After all, if it isn’t worth a few grand to get it right, is it even worth doing in the first place?

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This work originally appeared as a guest post for the As-Such Communications blog.

Page Load Speed: Why It Is Critical To Website Conversions and Profits

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Enjoy another fine guest post by Gary Walker of TopSide Media.

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Page Load Time: Don't Ignore This Important SEO Requirement

Page Load Time: Don't Ignore This Important SEO Requirement

Driving highly targeted traffic to your website is a critical step, but the landing page still has to convert that visitor to a lead or new customer. We recently helped one of our PPC clients whose online business was being adversely affected by slow page loading on their website. Their case could be useful to other business owners.

Web pages that load slowly can be tricky to find. Why? We’ll list just three of the many possible reasons.

For starters, if the slow load is being caused by images or large files, those may be stored in your computer but not in that of a new user to your site, your potential customer. If you have not cleaned your cache recently, you won’t have the same page load experience as a new user — yours will be faster, but deceptively so.

Next, if the problem is intermittent or browser specific, you simply might not run across it unless you or your webmaster test specifically for it.

Third, if you rely on data from PPC ad dashboards or web analytics, but focus on the wrong metric, slow page load problems may not be evident. For example, in search engine advertising, slow page load can “hide” behind normal impressions or click through rate in AdWords. Low bounce rate in your web analytics, which otherwise is a good indicator of user behavior on your website, also will not catch the problem. Why? if the user exits before the page fully loads, the analytics tracking code will not register the visit. However, the lack of results would certainly show up if you were measuring online conversions, incoming phone calls or click to contact or conversion rates in any manner.

In online advertising, if the page load speed problems are significant, they can cause your website to receive a low quality score from the ad provider. This, combined with the other inherent penalties of a slow web page, can trigger a downward spiral: higher click cost, lower page position or even low/no ad impressions. And, of course, low or no conversions.

If you have a webmaster watching your website, page load speed should be part of their normal monitoring. However, It never hurts for you to also know about page loads, and how fast your web pages load compared with those your competitors.

Product Management: Why You Should Care About “End-of-Life”

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I tend to focus heavily on outbound and inbound marketing strategy here on Return on Now. While there are hundreds of related topics in those areas, let’s take a moment to look at an important topic associated with Product Management.

What is Product Management?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the discipline, Product Management serves a hybrid role that sits between Engineering (or the equivalent product development group, depending on what your product is) and Product Marketing. This function is important for strategically translating market requirements, collected via research, campaign results, sales and customer feedback, etc., into product roadmaps and plans for upcoming development. They then feed information to the Product Marketing group for use in messaging activities leading up to a product launch or release.

Clearly, Product Management serves an important role in nurturing products as feature set is expanded, as well as defining new products to be developed and launched into the market. Everyone seems to understand that part implicitly. This role also includes a crucial responsibility that is often undermanaged or even completely ignored: Product End-of-life.

Why to Care About Product End-of-Life

If Only Product End-Of-Life Were This Simple...

If Only Product End-Of-Life Were This Simple...

Like customers, products have a full product life cycle. There are a slew of publications and courses about how to identify a market opportunity, concept a product, develop alpha and beta releases, finalize feature set, outline a roadmap for development, and launch into the market. This model is proven and important, but what happens when a product is no longer needed or superior products have made it obsolete?

To coin a very cheesy cliche: All good things must come to an end.

This is the area where I see the ball dropped by companies the most frequently. As businesses grow, this part of the process becomes a requirement, rather than something to “get to when the products get old.”

For early-stage companies who really don’t have official documented customer support plans, end-of-life is much simpler. Stop selling it, market a new product to the existing customers, consider offering discounts for upgrades or updates for those who still wish to work with you. Case closed.

Managing End-of-Life Properly

As your business grows, the situation becomes much more complicated. Customers will be more critical of businesses that cannot smoothly manage the transition from older products to new versions. Some important topics you might have to address would include:

  1. When to stop providing guaranteed maintenance or warranty terms
  2. Outline of the upgrade or update path
  3. Whether to “Grandfather” in old terms and conditions, rules, benefits, etc.
  4. Directions for customers to use old and new products together, if applicable
  5. Documentation of historical release path (for software / hardware technical products)
  6. Obsolescence of product accessories

This is most certainly not an exhaustive list, but enough information for you to get an idea of the challenge. Basically, you’ve established that there is a need, you’ve addressed the need, and now you simply cannot drop customers cold without some negative reaction. Particularly if you have a growing product portfolio, it is essential to help usher customers along from product version to product version, release to release, etc.

For those customers who will not upgrade, it is also important to clearly communicate when and what is being eliminated over time. Before making these types of changes, you need to advise all users of the product in question that a change is on the horizon. Provide ample time for them to upgrade or find another solution, and be sure to reach out to them multiple times. In this media and content-heavy world we now inhabit, frequency becomes even more important for ensuring your message is received and understood.

Conclusion

This seems like a lot of work, and in all honesty, it is! There are some darn good reasons for this function existing in the first place, and end-of-life is one of the most important, yet least understood.

How do you phase out products over time? Do you have established practices for this part of the product management puzzle? Do you ignore it? Let me know and indicate the size of your business; I am curious to learn whether our social-everything world is changing some or all of this practice as we better learn how to live in real-time.

Social Media for B2B: It CAN be done

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Aaron Strout

This week, Return On Now has the privilege of sharing with you a guest post by Aaron Strout, CMO of Powered Inc. right here in Austin, TX. In addition to running marketing, he also serves as a key “social voice” for the company.  In that capacity, Aaron continues with his speaking, blogging, podcasting, and social networking activities with an eye toward creating awareness and lead generation for the company. Aaron co-hosts the Quick-n-Dirty weekly podcast with Jennifer Leggio, he maintains a social media blog titled Citizen Marketer 2.1, and he is well-known as a thought leader in online and social media marketing.

For today’s post, Aaron has agreed to give his overview on B2B and how social media can actually be used to benefit the business. With all of the discussion surrounding concerns about measuring impact to the bottom line, I felt that this would be an important topic for all to hear.

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Why is it that, when it comes to conversation about social media, business-to-business (B2B) seems to get the short end of the stick every single time? As someone who does a lot of webcasts, blog posts, and speaking gigs, the question/comment that always comes up is, “what about B2B examples.” Fortunately for me, I’m able to mention companies like BreakingPoint Systems and Hubspot that do a great job tapping into the power of social media, but I often wish there were more examples (with public results) that I could discuss.

BuildingsIn thinking about this topic, one of the main reasons that B2B has taken a little longer to adopt social media into its marketing mix is that it’s harder to do effectively. It’s also feels risky because there is less control then  in other channels. With that said, I personally believe that B2B companies stand to benefit the most from social media because they live and die based on the strength of their customer relationships. On top of that, many B2B companies actually know exactly who their prospective customers are, so seeking those folks out in a meaningful way and creating relationships with them can have a huge impact on the bottom line.

Given that I’m a prescriptive kind of guy, I’d feel remiss if I didn’t offer up some tips about how companies can start thinking about putting social media into practice. There are obviously tons of ways, but here are a few (including a diagram that provides more color commentary on item number three):

  1. Start listening. This is easier to do than you think. Set up a Google alert for your company’s name, your competitors’ names, and keywords for your industry. If you’re already doing this, consider hiring a “listening” service like Techrigy, Radian6, or Meltwater Buzz. This will help you find where all the relevant conversations in your space are happening.
  2. Create a Twitter account for your business. However, resist the urge to put up links to press releases, product specs, and links to press that are singing your business’s praises (at least out of the gate). Instead, talk about things that people in your industry care about. For instance, if you create bill payment software, talk about the needs of small-to-medium sized businesses across the financial spectrum (payroll, credit, vendor management, etc.) Link to reports and industry analysis. Point out other peoples’ blog posts and magazine articles.
  3. Set up a blog. Before you do this, though, make sure you have someone (ideally internal) who is willing to commit to posting at least 5-6 times/month. This can be someone on your marketing, product, or PR teams, or even better, one of your executives. Think about creating an editorial calendar to help guide your topics. Most importantly, spend time looking at other industry related blogs — in fact, you should spend at least a month doing this before you set up your own blog. Be sure to comment on those blogs (talk about the topic, not your company). This will help with getting to know the relevant “social” people in the space.
  4. Create an online community. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with items 1-3, start thinking about an online community. Ideally, this is for both current and prospective customers. Some businesses feel more comfortable about creating private communities where customers can talk to one another. The key in either case is to hire a great community manager and let them help you create relevant content via webinars, blog posts, and conference calls (see diagram below). A community manager will also help you draw out your customers and ensure that conversations stay relevant and productive.
  5. Measure, measure, measure. This is less difficult than you might imagine. This really should start with looking at your current goals — i.e. new customers, greater retention, larger share of wallet, referrals, etc. Then make sure you benchmark (i.e. look at your webstats and current KPI’s) before you launch your social efforts. Then, look at how you’re moving the bar over time. A key place to look is your web analytics, to see what kind of traffic and engagement your Twitter feed and/or blog efforts are driving. Also, it doesn’t hurt to survey customers and ask them if your efforts are impacting their loyalty to your company.
B2B Community Model
B2B Community Model

I won’t lie to you; everything I mentioned above takes effort. But it’s worth trying, especially when it’s done right, because it will yield results. One thing that I failed to mention is the importance of integrating the recommendations above with your existing marketing/channel activity. Social media doesn’t live in a vacuum, and if nobody can find the fruit of your efforts, you may as well not have exerted the time and resources.

Am I missing anything? You bet I am. But that’s where you come in. What types of social media have you tried? What’s worked? Please feel free to share in the comments section below.

Social collaboration: Collaborating people, not tools

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This weekend was full of birthday celebration, so I decided to take a pass on my weekly self-written commentary. In my stead, I offer to you a guest post from my friend and  colleague Julie Hunt. Julie is a Market and Competitive Intelligence professional, and one of the best strategic and analytical minds with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working in the past decade.

Julie Hunt HeadshotThe following post originally appeared on her Highly Competitive blog under the title Social collaboration in the enterprise: The heart – and goal – of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools. Yes, this was focused on the enterprise, while this blog tends to hone in on SMB and Entrepreneurial topics. Regardless, the message is relevant to business professionals of all types, and it is most applicable for those of you who want to sell to and interact with larger companies.

Without further ado…

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Community and collaboration in business enterprises is about people working together more effectively, quickly, and proactively – to achieve the goals of the business as robustly as possible.  This may sound like a simplistic statement, but it seems to be eluding many companies that are adopting social media tools.

There is a constant stream of information on the internet on how to implementing social collaboration software in enterprises, both for internal and external purposes.  Quite a healthy industry of solutions, consultants and advisors has sprung into being.  Many blog posts and articles are devoted to recommending the best ways to take advantage of social media software.

But for many companies, implementation efforts for social collaboration software will be doomed to failure for one simple reason:  most enterprises have failed to engender a “collaboration culture” based on real human interaction. The executive management of many companies does not even understand what a “collaboration culture” is.

Frankly, executive management of many companies is hard put to authentically value employees – these companies want to de-humanize employees with such terms as “resources” and “human capital”, and think that it is enough if they sling around a few “mission statements” claiming that they “value” employees.

The proliferation and subsequent failure of traditional formal enterprise collaboration tools proves that collaboration is not successful just because there are software tools.  These formal collaboration solutions are usually unwieldy, result in silos of information,  are extremely opaque, and most importantly, fail to engage the humans for whom the collaboration venue is meant.

The newer social collaboration tools are better at ease-of-use, agility, relevance. But it is still essential that companies grow and nurture live collaboration cultures, where collaboration is a natural response for business activities, for any departments in the enterprise.  Planning a healthy collaboration culture also requires a dynamic plan for the role social media tools will play to bring the people in the company together in worthwhile interaction.

Returning to the human side of business won’t happen magically – it will take real work and real commitment, from the executive level through all levels of management and employee departments.

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And, of course, you’re not getting out of here without my two-cents worth. This comes down to the desire to control everything by large companies. Until they can figure out they no longer own the messaging and conversation, this problem will continue. As entrepreneurs and SMBs who can adapt and react quickly, you should view this fear of change as an opportunity for you to get a leg up on the big guys.

Now go forth and prosper!

Small Business Social Funding: Preneuraholics.com

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I recently learned of a cool new website via my ongoing social networking, and I was impressed enough with the idea  to share with you here on Return On Now.

[NOTE: I am in no way, financially or otherwise, affiliated with the service I am about to preview for you.]

For those of you who interact with me on Twitter, surely you’ve seen the materials I’ve been sharing regarding the difficulty of getting your hands on financing or investment capital for your small business ventures. Credit markets have been squeezed to a pulp, it has been challenging to figure out how decisions are being made at the SBA, and angel investors and venture firms are being more cautious than we’ve seen in years when doling out funds. What’s an entrepreneur to do?

The answer: Turn to your peers!

Preneuraholics was created to connect business owners who need some startup capital with other business owners who might be gracious enough to donate a few dollars to the cause. For a nominal $49 fee, you can list your business with a description of it and why you need the money. Then, others can donate whatever they feel comfortable sharing, even as little as $10.

Preneuraholics: Small Business Social Funding
Preneuraholics: Small Business Social Funding

This is a great idea! With all the talk about goodwill and giving back, there is finally an easy way to share not only advice and insight, but also cold hard cash. The power of this model will come from the number of participants. After all, most of us can afford to donate $10 or $20 to a struggling entrepreneur who just needs a break. In the grand scheme of things, that is not a lot of money to give up, but it can add up rather fast with solid participation. In fact, the site does a great job of highlighting how fast funds can add up…again, with the right level of participation by not only the businesses themselves, but other small business owner peers.

Need more incentive why you should participate here? In their own words…

It is time to take back the American Dream.
Americans are uniting together to develop a whole new system of small business funding.
By joining forces we can help each other.
It’s all in the power of unity!

And who can argue with those points? Not me, for one.

The site is still very new, so they are just now building up projects seeking funding and participants to help make it happen. I chose to write it up because I think it’s an idea that needs your support. Please check out the site, create a login, and see if there’s anyone you can help. Heck, reach out to them afterward and introduce yourself. I, for one, would be more than willing to engage with a new contact who believes in my idea enough to donate to it.

Please come back after you review the site and let me know what you think of it. And if you want to engage with the site proprietors directly, you can find them on Twitter @preneuraholic.