10 top must have tools for small business marketing (most are free!)

Small businesses often don’t have a lot of money to spend on marketing activities so here are my top 10 suggestions for stretching that budget to get the best ROI. Most are free!

1. Use a word press platform for your website. Why, because it is free, and it is already search engine friendly. Over 4000 visitors have been to my blog and it has cost me nothing but the time to learn how to use the tool and the time to update it.

2. Install Skype to connect with people all over the world. This helps grow your business (especially if it is serviced based beyond your immediate geography.)

3. Use a tool like Snagit to grab screen images to bright up your web, blog or visual presentations.

4.Jing is a free software that allows you to record your voice and screen and is great for presentations or podcasts with a visual element.

5. Invest in a database capture system. I am using Microsoft small business CRM that comes with 1 user licence but for others you can even use a excel sheet to start with columns for customer content. Just put it somewhere!

5. Autoresponders. These are tools that allow you to send automated emails to customers. Great tools to build a training program with or touch base with a regular newsletter to customers. I use Aweber but there are heaps out there.

6. You need a survey tool so you can do forms and run surveys. I have tried them all but I think Wufoo is the best. Best reports, easy to use, more flexible and great design.  

7. Vistaprint is a great site to design your business cards, brochures and invitations. It is quick, pretty cheap and easy to use. It also keeps a record of all your creations so you can quickly update or make changes and then get more printed!

8.PRwire is a great tool for doing your own PR. It is free and you can set up your company’s profile quickly and then email blast your release to the relevant media in a short space of time. Also it works!

9.Use the web. It is great for research. Google yourself and you might be surprised what you find. Or use Bing another great search engine. There are so many free resources out there!

10. Networking is a big part of marketing and more than ever before you can network effectively from your study or home office. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, blogs. There are so many forums to gather information, test and idea or build a network of possible collaborators and again it is free!

So there you go my top 10 tools, get going! Another article I did on customer insight has some other good ideas that cost you little and can help your marketing also.

Engaging the customer – that’s all it’s about!

I read a great quote from Ardath Albee

“Early stage content is not about your product. Your company is the only entity that truly cares about your product. What people care about is what your product enables them to achieve. But, at the early stage, prospects don’t even care about that. Whatever their situation, they’re dealing with it. It may not be ideal, but it hasn’t stopped them in their tracks, so it’s sufficient.
This means that we need to reach farther back from what our product enables people to achieve in order to create content relevant enough to gain the attention of early stage leads. Before you can talk to them about change, you’ve got to show them you understand their current circumstances.”

It all comes back to having authentic discussions with your customers. Talking about their issues. Resolving their challenges. IT IS NOT ABOUT YOU OR YOUR PRODUCT.

Have you hired a marketing consultant as small business?

If you have I would love for you to fill out my survey and I will collate the results.

Executive Summary from a My Yardstick Professional Satisfaction Report on Management consultants found the following results:

For the year 2009, 74% of participating businesses were satisfied, 7% were dissatisfied and 19% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with their business/management consultants.

Reasons for dissatisfaction over the last 12 months, in descending order of significance, were:

Reactive not proactive 11%

Other 13%

Poor service 12%

Do not understand my business 16%

Do not add value 26%

High costs 22%

I would love to find out more about how you found, use and how valuable your marketing consultant is to your small business. Please fill in my short survey and I will share the results.

Build a high performing team

Working with several GMs I have discovered some of the key issues I face is that of building a high performing management team. This process is not always straight forward and depends largely on the transparency of the individuals and the environment that the CEO or GM has created in allowing for candour in all communications. This openness has to work both ways.

Patrick Lencioni, published a book a while back, titled, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.” Patrick identifies some key steps in identifying if you have a problem in your management team

From his book:

1. Absence of trust. In the context of building a team, trust is the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group. In essence, teammates are not comfortable being vulnerable with one another.
2. Fear of conflict. All great relationships, the ones that last over time, require productive conflict in order to grow. This is true in marriage, parenthood, friendship, and certainly business. Unfortunately, conflict is considered taboo, stressful, and inefficient in many situations, especially at work, so it doesn’t happen when it should.
3. Lack of commitment. Team commitment is a function of two things: clarity and buy-in. The two greatest causes of lack of commitment are the desire for consensus and the need for certainty. Neither is usually possible. With an executive team, lack of commitment causes irresolvable discord to ripple down through the organization.
4. Avoidance of accountability. Team accountability refers specifically to the willingness of team members to call their peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the team. They may not want to risk a friendship, but this ironically causes relationships to deteriorate as team members resent one another for not living up to expectations.
5. Inattention to results. The ultimate dysfunction of a team is the tendency of members to care about individual status or sub-team status more than the collective goals of the group. An unrelenting focus on specific objectives and clearly defined outcomes is a requirement for any team that judges itself on performance.

These might seem like no brainer but this culture of inclusiveness and candour is hard to fabricate. It needs to be based on authenticity to have any real merit. It comes back to how comfortable each individual is in receiving and giving feedback for the benefit of the whole.

Keith Ferrazzi gives some great tools to help you build these sorts of relationships and his book Who’s got your back is an excellent starting point.

Jack Welch also mentions the importance of candour in building great teams. If you can’t do this internally initially then perhaps bring in a consultant to facilitate this progress. A great deal of growth both personally and business wise is sure to occur.

Diagram Catayst consulting

Here are my slides on creating a great team.

Sales readiness – how ready is your sales team?

Research from the Training Industry has come up with top 5 issues that sales teams face.

Top Five issues

1. Value propositions that differentiate you from the competition
2. Translating products and services information into solution stories
3. Elevating messages to the executive buyer
4. Assessing and responding to customer needs
5. Handling objectives

Great audio from the American Marketing Institute and a talk from Corporate Visions  or video on the research.

The basic premise is that marketing and sales need to work together to create the right tools and messaging that will make the best impact.

Here is a link to my slides on creating sales and marketing integration.