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Real Life Networking – Making Marketing Work

Tara Jacobsen — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:05:07 +0000

Real life networking can make a huge difference in how fast you can grow your business. Getting out there and talking to groups of people who have the ability to hire you can produce high quality leads.

BUT, (you are saying to yourself), if that is the case, why are you schlepping around to 20 networking events a month and getting no business? There are myriad considerations that you need to look at to determine if you are doing the right kind of networking. Here are my top tips:

How To Pick A Networking Group

Picking a networking group based on demographics – If you are selling a product that only is used by companies with 25 or more full time employees, networking off of meetup.com may not work for you. You may have to join Chambers of Commerce or industry trade groups to get the kind of buyer prospects you are looking for. On the other hand, if you work with small business owners (like we do), many of the meetup groups are perfect for finding propects who may be able to use our services.

Picking a networking group based on interest – If you are involved in boat sales, picking a networking group that is involved in boating or water sports will fit the bill. In this case, you better be passionate about the product you are selling or they will spot you as a phony a mile away! This kind of networking requires that you know a lot about your industry, AND it is a brilliant place to get speaking opportunities.

Picking a networking group based on the time it meets – This is SUPER important. If the networking groups you belong to all meet at night and you are an early bird, you may miss meetings and also not be at your best to shine. I would love to join some of the networking groups that meet in the evening around here but know that I would be cranky and would find excuses to get out of them. Instead I focus on finding groups that meet during business hours with the kinds of prospects I am looking for!

How To Pitch Yourself or Your Product

Know what you are selling – It is impossible for people to buy something from you if your product offerings are vague. Stand up and say in a clear voice, “I sell X” OR “I work with X types of businesses to…” OR even the old standby “I am looking for the types of clients who…” I attend a bunch of networking events where people talk about their services like THEY don’t know what they are selling. “Well, we work with, um, I guess the kind of people, ah, well I guess I like to work with”. ARGG. NO ONE is going to give you their hard earned money unless they know that you are going to give them a value for it!

Tell them what is in it for THEM – Instead of saying “we are a metrics focused company with legacy technology, leveraging the power of the internet…”, say “we help small business owners get their websites found on the internet”. I see A LOT of selling features versus selling benefits at networking events.

Do not tell them everything about your company all at once – I have seen many networkers come to one networking event and never show up again. Invariably, these people spend about 10 minutes in the middle of the 1 minute commercial telling everything about their company, as fast as they can. This never works, “real” members roll their eyes and stop hearing you after about a minute and half!

Marketing Materials to bring to Real Life Networking

There are some great pieces that you should bring to networking events and I rarely see anyone with handouts so you are going to stand out even more.

Your business card – make sure you have your Facebook and Twitter names on this too. Businesspeople are looking for how to stay in touch with you which will equal more sales!
An offer for a free consultation – offer a 15 minute free phone consultation. Basically you are getting people to make your follow up calls for you!
Upcoming events – if you are having an open house or sale, give people a handout with the date, time and location. Extra credit if you print it on a colored piece of paper that will stand out from the rest of the papers!
Your brochure – I order mine from VistaPrint so that I can buy them cheaply enough to give to everyone I meet. Having a high end brochure that you are afraid to “waste” is a recipe for disaster.
A coupon – offer a discount coupon good for a set period of time or a set dollar amount.

If you are going to take your time to go to networking events, make sure you are using that time to the best of your abilities. Take every opportunity to speak if they have a member spotlight, get business cards from everyone and enter them into your database. Do one on ones with people who could help your business or be a prospective client. In general, make it worth your time and effort!

Unintended Marketing Consequences Beware Beware

Tara Jacobsen — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:58:44 +0000

Unintended marketing consequences pop up at the most inopportune times! If you are not minding your goals, it is easy to run off the track with something new and shiney that does not do what you thought it did.

I have to say that I hear about all kinds of new marketing ideas every day from blogs I read, email lists, readers who send me ideas and friends who know I like marketing. Some of them are G-R-E-A-T and some have put a really bad mojo on my marketing efforts. That is why I generally test out anything I am going to recommend on my stuff first. At least if I mess my Marketing Artfully or Tara Jacobsen marketing up I can usually fix it!

Recent unintended consequences…:)

MarketingArtfully.com redesign – to all you email readers out there, you may not know that I redid Marketing Artfully’s look and feel. While it is BEAUTIFUL, I have to say that it DID make some time changes necessary. In the past I could knock out a post in about 15 minutes and bang, up it went. Now there is more juggling around with image sizes, categorizing and more. Not a deal breaker but DEFINITELY did not know that would be the result!
Adding everyone to Gist – Now I do not know if www.gist.com is going to take off BUT like all things that pop up I joined in case it does do well (here is my take on Social Networking First Responder Advantages). That having been said, uploading everyone all at once to that one was a major ick factor. It wound up creating the same mess that I have now trying to follow all my real friends online stuff.
Getting more of the kind of clients you DO NOT WANT! My biggest beef with unintended consequences is when you are very successful but have started down the wrong road. This has happened to me a couple times where I built a successful client base but did not like the work I was doing. Argg. Be very careful to plan who you want to work with BEFORE you get started with what kind of marketing to do

If you have any neat bad marketing mojo stories, please feel free to share them here!!!

PS – The title of this post cracks me up, the Beware Beware part comes from the movie Labyrinth and funny rock people say that in a really spooky voice…I am cracking myself up over here this morning!

No related posts.

Free Tampa Speaker Training!

Tara Jacobsen — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:53:35 +0000

You all know I am obsessed with speaking and I am SO bummed that I can’t attend this!!! FOR FREE (it is a $1497 program but when you click through it is free for my readers because Dustin is my pal..:) Make sure to grab your seat now – SEATING IS LIMITED!

Click for Speaker Makeover, Tampa Florida – Saturday, August 29th & Sunday, August 30th

Hilton Tampa Airport Westshore
2225 N. Lois Ave.
Tampa, FL 33607

Facebook Hits 250K Users!

Tara Jacobsen — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:24:48 +0000

I thought you might like to see how the progression of facebook looks! Think about it, as a small business owner, how do you ignore this HUGE media outlet. If you would like to be my friend, I am at www.facebook.com/tara.jacobsen

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One-offs – How they cost small business owners time and opportunity!

Tara Jacobsen — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:33:57 +0000

According to Miriam Webster “one-offs” are limited to a single time, occasion or instance. I see MANY small business owners making the mistake of looking at customers as a one-off and also looking at one-off projects as real opportunities rather than the tremendous problems they really are!

One-offing Your Customers

I know, that sounds kind of bad AND it is! When we are in the trenches selling out products or services it can get really easy to become laser focused and lose the big picture. Your product or service may not be the answer to every problem and it is disingenuous to try and make it fit. Also, getting money from a customer one time (even a lot) but burning the relationship is SO not worth it!

The first goes along with the old saying, “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. I worked for a GREAT company a while ago who operated like this. They were SO passionate about their product that they answered every question with “well you should use our product for that…and that…and that”. They also NEVER talked about any solutions other than their product, even if their solution was not in the best interest of the client. Humans recognize quickly that someone is doing this and then apply a filter to the information, always looking for the “gotcha” rather than listening to benefits.

The other half of this is sucking a customer dry with EVERYTHING you can take, burning them out for any future sales and losing your credibility at the same time. I know, a bird in the hand and all that BUT the lifetime value of a customer, their referrals and their goodwill is worth SO much more than taking everything you can get and leaving a bad taste in their mouth. Be honest with yourself about your motivation and make sure that you are doing what you can to serve your clients fairly and they will stay with you, bringing in way more than you could have made on one single transaction.

One-offing Your Projects

This one is SUPER easy for small business owners to do! It is always tempting to bring additional revenue to your company by taking on a project that is SORT OF like what you are doing now. A great example is our blogging product – we sell self-hosted wordpress blogs on Godaddy hosting. We have a 5 page, single spaced process to how to set it up and make it web ready ON GODADDY.

There are about a million other hosting companies and sometimes we have potential clients who would like to use their own preferred host. That is great for them, bad for us. Figuring out how to build blogs effectively on two different hosts would be inefficient, three would be terrible and ten would be absurd!

Make sure that you know EXACTLY what your company does and doesn’t do. Have referral partners that you can send people who don’t fit to. I KNOW – as entrepreneurs we think we can do anything! Just remember that learning to do something special for one customer may never transfer into revenue from anyone else and takes away time from your core business!

How To Pick New Small Business Opportunities

Tara Jacobsen — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:34:31 +0000

This month’s second small business marketing newsletter was about having multiple streams of income, which got me thinking about how we should choose those streams for ourselves. I have a confession to make…I am a huge proponent of multiple streams of income and I have an entrepreneurial spirit so I spend lots of time considering new things I COULD do to increase my business opportunities. This post is about what I (and you) SHOULD do to maximize my time and effort and minimize pain!

John Jonas gave the best description I ever heard about how to pick what to do. He said you should never get more than one step away from what you do now or more than one step away from the kind of customer you serve now when deciding new things to try.

Here is my one step approach for Marketing Artfully. The three main things I do for my business are blogs, information products and speaking. Because information products often have affiliate programs, starting my own or joining someone else’s is a good fit for me and makes sense to add to myÂ resource page. Also, doing internet masterminds involves speaking (which is one of my things) so it is okay also.

Some other things for me that would be a good fit are things that provide services to entrepreneurs and small business owners, social networking items and other business related items.

Now here comes the brilliant part – when I get a great idea of something to do that is NOT one step away, I can drop it quickly. Instead of spending time and energy on researching something (or more likely diving into something) that will not help my business, I can easily determine if it is a good fit and, if not, move on!

This system works for ANY business! My buddy Deb Ward of Deborah Ward and Associates is a realtor in the Tampa Bay area. You can see from her blocks that there are some things that match well with her business model and some that don’t. She does coaching, sells real estate and owns a team of realtors. Getting referrals and owning shares in a title company are great for her, she could also add speaking to realtors easily because of her coaching focus. BUT, adding non-real estate related items would dilute her message and efforts.

So, to all you entrepreneurs out there considering new ventures…make sure that you are checking your blocks and keeping on track for success!!

Twitter Tools – How To Use Twitter Effectively!

Tara Jacobsen — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:54:06 +0000

I have been on a mission to find the ultimate twitter tools to review (and to make twitter time cost effective for my small business!) With that in mind I have researched the best the internet has to offer twitter-wise and have my findings and suggestions here. Now you may be asking yourself, why so much twitter info in one place? Well I have found that if I make a big page like this where I “remember” all I have learned about twitter I don’t have to keep re-learning the same things!

Don’t forget – we also offer a social networking video course that walks you though setting up all your social networks and how to use them to increase your business!

Ultimate FREE Twitter Tool Review

These are the things that I am using or have seen great reviews from others who use them! If you have a great tool I have missed, please feel free to leave a comment and I will check it out – that having been said, don’t try to spam my gang, I moderate your comments and will not publish spammy stuff!

Ping.FM – This is the free tool that I use to update my big three networks on my basic status updates like “writing a twitter review page”. I haven’t found it to be wonderful for sending out links but I think it has that capability.

TweetLater.com – I use this one for my heavy twitter lifting! It allows me to send out a message anytime someone follows me (I drive people to my facebook profile), it automatically follows anyone who follows me AND I could set it up to tweet stuff for me automatically (haven’t done this yet but will soon!) One word of caution – it does allow you to “unfollow” anyone who won’t follow you. I DO NOT recommend this both personally (I live in abundance and that is SO counter-intuitive) and professionally (twitter seems to dis-like this practice and could suspend your account!)

Hootsuite.com – I have heard good things about this service and it seems to be similar to tweetlater.com, I think it is just a matter of preference!

Twitterfeed.com – Twitter Feed sends all the blog posts that I write to twitter AUTOMATICALLY! It was a little convoluted to set up but SO worth the time!!!

TwitterGrader.com – Really neat site that shows how many twitter followers you have over time!

LocalTweeps.com – Cool way to find twitter-ers who are local to your area or your target niche!

http://sur.vey.me/ – Make surveys for twitter, it was SUPER easy. I made one and will update this post with the results!!!

Twixplode.com – Free course from Sean Malarkey on how to grow a twitter following. I am only part way through but got some good info from what he has sent so far! I did not find ANY disgruntled people talking about Sean or his product.

XavierMedia.com – I used this free twitter follower service and did see a small spike in my followers. It works like a pyramid scheme where your name goes at the bottom and more and more people follow you based on how far it gets. It did not seem malicious and worked okay although I am not sure that I got targeted followers.

Hashtags.org – Allows you to see what is trending hot on twitter in real time. It is great for targeting tweets IF that topic is in you niche market!!

Twellow.com – Yellow pages for twitter. A free service and really easy to use!

Tweetadder.com – Free to $55 – seems to be a really good service. I have not used it yet but will update the post when I get more info!

WeFollow.com – Free service, you can add yourself to, it doesn’t seem to help all that much until you have a bunch of followers.

Paid Twitter Tool Recommendations

Opennetworker.com -Top Linked’s networking arm. I used the free Top Linked in Linked In for a while and got okay results. You have to manually invite people and there is no twitter alternative. I paid about $50 for year membership to Open Networker and WOW – I have doubled my linked in and gotten about 500 new twitter followers in the first couple of days. If you are going to pay for something – this is REALLY GOOD!

TwitterPowerSystem.com – Sells for $77 and seems to be a good source of information! Will update with more info if I buy it!

Social Networking Videos By Marketing Artfully – I SO recommend these for new social networkers! (they are mine!)

Not So Impressed With Twitter Tools

Disclaimer – I have not bought or used and of these tools and so am just going by the other things that I have seen out there. Please know that being on this part of the list DOES NOT mean that these tools are evil or not worth purchasing, they are just not what I would choose to spend my money on!

TwitterTrafficMachine – only $25 and claims to be able to help you get thousands of followers AND has a great affiliate program. I found some pretty harsh criticism about it so cannot recommend it to my tribe.

Tweetergetter – this one is about $9 and claims that you will tens of thousands of followers. Again, harsh words were spoken and so not a fan favorite over here.

Twitter4Marketing – This one charges a sliding scale for how many twitter followers you want from $80 to $360. I have to stand my Open Networker recommendation above since you get twitter and linked in for one price!

Lop.net – Charges ONE THOUSAND dollars per month. Nuff said.

Social Networking and Blogs – How Do They Get You More Business?

Tara Jacobsen — Sun, 31 May 2009 13:51:11 +0000

Join Twitter and get a tons of money, be a Facebook user and get a million clients, get LinkedIn and EXPLODE your business, or build your blog and get a gagillion readers!!! If that is how you think it works then this is probably not the post for you! You WILL be disappointed. Using the internet is just like real life, getting new customers and growing your business is hard work.

So how can you REALLY get new business on the internet using blogs and social networking? I am going to tell you some stories from my experience, you can then extrapolate them to your business!

GETTING AN INTERVIEW WITH WOMENOF.com

So I blew into town (Westminster, CO) with my marketing roadshow and decided to re-build my marketing business here in Colorado. To meet people I joined the Elle Group – a networking group for small business owners. I have met close to 100 small business owners face-to-face thus far. At one of those sessions I got invited to another networking session and said “yes I would go”. I met a girl named Tara there who is big on Facebook. I became her Facebook friend.Â

that is the first online thing – you CANNOT grow your business sitting at home in front of a computer, sometimes you have to meet humans!

She posted a message telling us to ask about marketing opportunites with WomenOf.com. I asked. She had a fellow call me and, long story short, I am being interviewed for an online video on Monday! WHOO WHOO – how fun!!! The three pivot points in this story are “friending” Tara, being open to talking with her about opportunities and having a great blog. When they went online and checked me out to see if I should be interviewed, they found this blog and validated their decision because of the information that I have here about marketing!

GETTING BUTTS IN THE SEATS AT MY EVENTS

When I speak I like having humans there! In the past when I wanted to invite people, I would make a flyer, send some emails and wonder if anyone was showing up.

Now I use Facebook and LinkedIn to send a messages about my event to people who are my “friends” or “connections”, who have already raised their hands and said they are interested in hearing from me. The amazing thing to me is that is just the tip of the iceburg! Once a person who is in my sphere accepts, the programs tell everyone in their sphere.Â

Last month I taught Social Networking in Clearwater and my buddy Brian P. Forrester, the mortgage man, said that he was going to be coming. One of his connections saw that and came too! It was amazing that on a Wednesday afternoon in Clearwater I could get about 25 people into a room to hear me speak!Â

So what is the moral of the story? Social networking will not make you a galillionaire overnight. You will still have to network with humans. BUT there are tools out there that exponentially increase your message and if you are not taking advantage of them, you are leaving business on the table!

Want to save yourself time getting started? Check out our social networking how to videos!

Free Marketing – Small Business Owners Best Friend

Tara Jacobsen — Tue, 12 May 2009 11:52:43 +0000

What a time we live in! Marketing is free, I am SO happy about that and so confused that more businesses are not leveraging these channels.

Some history…in 1999 I worked at Digital Chainsaw, an internet company, where we built websites for small businesses. Many of these companies had no online presence and were trying to be early adopters. The cost to do the blueprint for the site (NOTHING was built) was $1,000 and the cost of building the site was from $20,000-$40,000. Now don’t get me wrong, there are still some businesses that have to have professionally built websites with big back-end programming, but most small businesses do not. The last thing about that time to tell you, it was deep in the heart of the tech boom and small business start-up money was flowing freely!

Fast forward 10 years to a new business start-up (if you are not doing marketing you are a start-up no matter how old your company is). I talk to more and more small business owners that do not have ANY resources for marketing. And THAT IS OKAY! I can’t even believe I can say that but it is true.

Today we are going to talk about FREE MARKETING! Upcoming posts will talk about low cost marketing and then big money marketingÂ – which still will not come close to the $20,000 that used to be the norm!

FREE MARKETING IDEAS!

Blogs – today you can have a blog set up in minutes for free! I suggest starting with www.wordpress.com but www.blogger.com works and is my geeky husband’s favorite. You can add widgets, customize the blog with your logo and get your marketing message out there! The drawback, for me, on free blogs is that it is hard to put contact forms on free blogs which will be part of our moderate pricing marketing. If you want to skip the free blog and go to the medium priced blog. I recommend a self-hosted wordpress blog for as low as $500!
Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – These social media sites allow you to put up a profile, communicate with your customers and friends, post links to your blog posts and set up FREE event notifications. They allow you to build a community around your brand and I can’t tell you how many referrals I have businesses get while watching my “friends”. If you would like to find out more, check out our social networking video series (not free but VERY affordable!)
FREE Websites – www.wetpaint.com, www.squidoo.com and other sites will allow you to put a free page on the subject of your choice. When I was a realtor in Dunedin Florida a few years ago I put up this page, years later it is still there AND if you do a search on Squidoo for Dunedin real estate, my page is the only page. Do a search for Dunedin screen printing and NOTHING comes up, same for Dunedin Lawyer, Accountant, and cleaning. Imagine if you had the Tampa Bay area sewn up for your local business? What would that do for your bottom line? AND google LOVES these sites!

So these are my three best FREE marketing ideas. They cost you nothing but time and provide BIG results! If you have some other free ideas let me know in the comments…:)

Social Networking Will Replace Google?

Tara Jacobsen — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:10:10 +0000

So why do I think social networking will replace google and how does that make this post a followup to telling the truth? (I wrote a post a couple of days ago about why I think that telling the truth is the best way to conduct business!)

Firstly, I attended a Jeffery Gitomer training session and he said that “truth” is going to be the new standard for business and he cited the Enron bunch as people who scammed the system and got caught, much to the detriment of their businesses. Well that training was BEFORE the huge financial meltdown that has occurred because of what is perceived as Wall Street defrauding the public.

Secondly, I then attended a training session (I get A LOT of training!) where a tech guy said that google will be irrelevant in 5 years. GOOGLE and IRRELEVANT in the same sentence? How can that be?!?!?! Well it just so happens I agree with him to a point. I DO think people will still “Google” you to see if you are who you say you are, BUT I also think that social networking will become so large that if you need a referral you will just ask someone you know – online!

Many of my online “friends” I have never met in person but I trust them and their judgement. If I needed a plumber here in Colorado (I am new), I would NOT go to the yellow pages OR google, I would ask my online realtor friends if they had a good referral! If I needed a dentist, doctor, printer, good travel agent, ANYTHING, I would ask my “friends” first. And as more and more people join these networks it will become more apparent that goole will be less attractive and referrals more-so.

So have you googled yourself lately in relation to your business? Does it show you? Check out “Tara Jacobsen Marketing” and you will see LOTS of entries that show that I am who I say I am on google – that is a very good thing!