Small Biz Data Intervention – Strike a Balance to Make Sound Decisions

Photo credit: neeravbhatt via Flickr under Creative Commons license

Big Data has become an obsession for businesses large and small. And why not? The technology, speed, volume and variety allow unprecedented and immediate access to customer insights and behaviors, allowing you to switch gears at the drop of a dime. But if you are making decisions based on data alone, you are in need of an intervention, for the beauty of data is all about striking a balance between information and intuition.

In his blog, Kaan Turnali, a business intelligence expert for SAP’s Global Customer Operations (GCO) Reporting & Analytics Platform and an adjunct professor at Wilmington University, provides a number of reasons why more data is not a guarantee for better decisions. Here are a few highlights:

Data Is the Raw Material for Better-Informed Decisions—Not Necessarily Better Decisions

The concept of “better-informed” decisions is distinctly different than the concept of “better” decisions. Better-informed leaders don’t always make better decisions, but better decisions almost always start with better-informed leaders. …History is filled with examples of leaders making “bad” decisions even in light of ample amounts of data to support the decision-making process.

When It Comes to Data, Quality Comes Before Quantity

We seem to take quality for granted. …It’s true that as quantity increases we can achieve greater depth and perspective. But by the same token, data for the sake of data doesn’t help us either. Data quality (a field on its own) is fundamental for driving consistency and relevancy when it comes to making better-informed decisions.

Technology Alone Can’t Deliver Better Decisions

Coupled with the right technology, design, and implementation, analytics platforms can deliver on all three pillars of business intelligence: insight into the right data, for the right role, and at the right time. …But technology alone won’t guarantee a successful outcome. Our teams’ talent plays a more pivotal role. Their passion, regardless of the challenges they face or the resources available to them, will be the determining factor.

If It Can’t Be Trusted, People Won’t Use It

Untrustworthy data is a frustration that’s prevalent in small, mid-size, and Fortune 500 businesses. The issues that arise from a lack of trust in data are not just limited to leadership roles but affect everyone in the enterprise regardless of their roles or position. …The journey to promoting a culture of data-driven decision makers must start with making data quality a top priority for key data assets and decision engines. Above all, it demands a mindset to see data as a strategic asset. When the data quality is consistently excellent, then it becomes trustworthy.

More Data Is Useless if We Aren’t Asking the Right Questions

Having all the data and more of it doesn’t do much good if we aren’t asking the right business questions or simply don’t understand our assumptions. And most important is critical thinking—a skill we must demand in business.

Each of the …reasons I’ve covered prove one key point—more data should be guarded with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Read 5 Reasons Why More Data Doesn’t Guarantee Better Decisions and 5 More Reasons Why More Data Doesn’t Guarantee Better Decisions. 

In an article posted on data-driven-marketing.net, we picked up this piece of good advice:

You don’t go from data to decisions and actions. You have data -> information -> insights -> decisions/actions -> business value.

Do you allow data to drive your decision-making? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section of this post and tune in to the live episode (9-17-14, 1pm ET) of The Marketing Mojo Show to discuss your big data dilemmas with Nancy L. Hohns, author of the LGK white paper, In the Thick of It: Big Data versus Gut Instinct. Download your complimentary copy here and read our previous posts on big data.

• A Mindset to Maximize Your Small Business Approach to Big Data
• Small Business Primer for Success in the Era of Data Democracy
• The Uncertainty of Big Data – Guidance for Small Businesses

For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest.

Small Business Primer for Success in the Era of Data Democracy

Photo credit: Infocux via Flickr under Creative Commons license

When it comes to data, many small businesses are like Dorothy in the Land of Oz, not exercising the power from within to discover or apply their power – invaluable internal insight. Many rely upon sophisticated software and robotic numerical conclusions to lead the business down a complicated, confusing and conflicted yellow brick road: analyses and decisions tied to pure numbers instead of analyses and decisions tied to the goals and objectives of the company’s business and marketing plans. Even a pair of ruby red slippers did not guarantee Dorothy’s return to Kansas and numbers alone will not provide 100 percent validation of the right direction for your business. Before making any investment in business analysis platforms or programs and being overwhelmed by the sheer volume, variety and velocity of information, get a handle on the insight from within the organization. Then, put that existing data in perspective. Evaluate and analyze the influence and impact upon your organization, customers and stakeholders in accordance with your current goals, objectives, strategies and tactics.

Nancy L. Hohns

In a previous post, Nancy L. Hohns, LGK in-house strategist, reviewed the best marketing tools within your reach. As we embrace the era of Big Data, Nancy has a few suggestions for integrating data and gut instinct in a meaningful way to maximize your marketing momentum. Read her latest white paper, In the Thick of It: Big Data versus Gut Instinct. Select the image below for complimentary download instructions.

Click this image to access the white paper download instructions

For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest.

Why a Small Business without a Marketing Budget is like a Kardashian with a Reality Show

It Makes No Sense!

It Makes No Sense!

It Makes No Sense!

There, I said it and without a doubt, you know where this writer stands on the topic of the aforementioned reality television franchise. Notwithstanding the cheeky tease, the analogy is perfectly valid. It makes no sense for a small business: startup or established, B2B or B2C, to not have a budget for marketing. We have said it on this site before and we will continue to provide you with resources, tools and inspiration that empower you to connect with customers and to build your brand. If you are searching for guidelines on budgeting for marketing, you will find the following advice and recommendations extremely helpful.

In a post for SCORE, a national nonprofit business mentoring organization for small businesses, Jeanne Rossomme, provides a number of tips for setting up your marketing budget. One in particular, we cannot stress enough:

Dedicate about 10% of revenue to marketing and sales. Many companies (according to a recent survey by the CMO Council) spend quite a bit less than this figure with 16% of companies spending between 5-6% of revenue on marketing, with 23% spending over 6%. But marketers of new products often invest 20% of projected revenues for launch. So, in general for a relatively new and growing business budget, allocate about ten percent of revenue to marketing, with half of that amount spent on labor – either your internal staff or external marketing firms.

Read the original post at SCORE.org

From the Small Business Administration, SBA, these words of wisdom:

… many small businesses don’t allocate enough money to marketing or, worse, spend it haphazardly.

Products and services don’t sell themselves. By ignoring marketing until it’s too late, many small businesses risk hitting a brick wall and, quite possibly, failing. A hip and trendy product line shouldn’t rely solely on ongoing product investment and word of mouth.

As a general rule, small businesses with revenues less than $5 million should allocate 7-8 percent of their revenues to marketing. This budget should be split between 1) brand development costs (which includes all the channels you use to promote your brand such as your website, blogs, sales collateral, etc.), and 2) the costs of promoting your business (campaigns, advertising, events, etc.).

This percentage also assumes you have margins in the range of 10-12 percent (after you’ve covered your other expenses, including marketing).

If your margins are lower than this, then you might consider eating more of the costs of doing business by lowering your overall margins and allocating additional spending to marketing. It’s a tough call, but your marketing budget should never be based on just what’s left over once all your other business expenses are covered.

Read the original post at SBA.gov

Lastly, take a tip from Ramon Ray, Small Business Evangelist for Infusionsoft, Technology Evangelist for Smallbiztechnology.com, best-selling author of The Facebook Guide to Small Business Marketing, and recent guest on LGK’s The Marketing Mojo Show. In the two-minute audio clip below, Ray succinctly states an important benefit of budgeting for marketing.

Do you budget for marketing or are you Keeping up with the Kardashians? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section of this post.

For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest.

GB O’Brien
LGK Marketing Communications Collective

Whatever the Outcome, Serve up a Good Pitch to Maximize Your Small Business Marketing Momentum

Serve up a Good Pitch! Photo credit: Lauryn McDowell via Flickr under Creative Commons license

Not everyone connects with a good pitch. In baseball, that’s the point, right? On the other hand, in business, that’s a lesson learned by a North Carolina entrepreneur who appeared on the ABC hit television show, Shark Tank. Despite a unanimous “Great pitch, but I’m Out” on the investment opportunity, the Sharks’ refusal to bite did not derail the passion of Julie Busha, owner of Slawsa, a condiment product (ironically, in another episode, the Sharks bit on a good pitch and the business, Lipstick Remix, failed). Nor did their decision derail the marketing momentum of the product, which is currently available in more than 6,000 retail locations throughout the United States and Canada. In a post-show article, Julie shared a few small business takeaways from her out-of-the tank experience that are well worth repeating here:

Surround Yourself with the Best. …You can make your life easier if you surround yourself with the best. We live in a day of technology where outsourcing can be more effective than hiring within, especially if you’re small. But believe me, you’d rather be the quarterback who understands the game and can call the plays versus having three guys who sit on the bench.

Quality surpasses quantity every time, and making wise decisions to align yourself with the best will help your business run efficiently.

Never Let Someone’s Inability to See Your Value Determine Your Worth. …Success is not defined as making a deal on Shark Tank. Believe it or not, the voice of America reigns louder than that of any Shark, and those are the voices that matter most.

Read the article at Huffington Post.com

Back to the pitch. There’s brewing debate on the merits of company/elevator pitches. On a recent episode of LGK’s The Marketing Mojo Show, Sue Baroncini-Moe, business/marketing strategist and author of Business in Blue Jeans: How to Have a Successful Business on Your Own Terms in Your Own Style, states that elevator pitches become “weird practice speak” and generally she does not believe in them. Instead, Baroncini-Moe prefers and recommends having a conversation to position what you do and the value of what you do in a context that is relevant to the person with whom you are speaking. Flip the script, practice speak or not, entrepreneurs and small business owners should embrace the process of describing their business, the vision, solutions and target market(s) as a marketing opportunity and to maintain focus. Whether you call it an elevator or company pitch, value or purpose statement, our advice to you is to not launch or leave the office without a succinct summary that conveys your business value and benefit. That’s the basis of a good pitch.

Do you have an elevator pitch; do you think it is necessary? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section of this post. In the meantime, here’s the Shark Tank episode featuring Julie Busha of Slawsa (about 11 minutes, 30 seconds into the video).

For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest.

Design Points to Maximize Your Marketing Momentum

Photo Credit: Glassholic/Flickr under Creative Commons license

Many of us hear it repeatedly to think like a customer, client or user and to focus on experiences and personas to develop a strategy, content and messaging. Well, the same is true for design and we’d like to add a few bonus points to our quarterly focus on this topic.

Kristen Ewald puts together an excellent post on experience design to help guide the development of your design objectives.

User experiences matter to even the smallest of enterprises. Think about all of the customers who visit your retail store, get help from a sales rep, order a service, set up a product, access your website from a mobile device, or contact tech support. Their interactions with your company or brand often determine whether or not they choose to do business with you again.

Design should not be thought of as a “nice to have.” It has become a business imperative and a competitive differentiator. With each touch point, a customer has a good or a bad experience. The overall experience it creates is your brand.

Experience strategy is in many ways quickly overtaking the role played in the past by brand strategy. Today brands can say whatever they want about “this is who we are,” but if the experience they create with their products and services is not in line with the expectation they have set, they may not succeed.

Read the original article at Intuit Small Business Blog.

Listen to award-winning designer and design firm owner, Bernadette Rivell Daniels of Identity Brand + Design, on the importance of design in this LGK Marketing Memo.

Download the Marketing Assets Toolkit, which includes a checklist of marketing materials and collateral that require design TLC.

What guides your design strategy? Price, personal tastes, buyer personas? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section of this post.

For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest. Maximize your momentum!

Inventory Your Marketing Assets to Maximize Your Momentum

Photo Credit: AJC1/Flickr under Creative Commons license

Every company – sole proprietorships, mom and pops, startups and corporate giants- has them: marketing assets. All content and related materials, from the obvious to the obscure, used to educate, inform or generate interest in the company are marketing assets. The Marketing Assets Toolkit is a complimentary guide to identify and evaluate the various components, their continuity and effectiveness. It will prove useful as a preliminary step in creating a set of guidelines and standards to promote and present the company to internal and external audiences.

So what are you waiting for? We have done the work of listing many assets and evaluation criteria to start your inventory process and maximize your marketing momentum. Select the image below for download instructions.

Spice Up Your Marketing Mojo: 4 Success Factors of Professional Design

Photo credit: Flickr under Creative Commons license

Two years ago, a survey of more than 1,500 small-business owners, startups and entrepreneurs revealed that small businesses expect professional design to become increasingly important to their success in the years ahead. In a related article featured in the American Express online site Open Forum, Matt Mickiewicz, co-founder of 99designs, the company that conducted the survey, offered a few reasons why professional design should be a priority. We would like to highlight these reasons – which remain relevant- with Matt’s rationale for the consideration of those of you sitting on the sidelines of professional design.

Impression

Two-tenths of a second is the maximum amount of time subjects viewing a website took to form a first impression, according to a study published in February 2012 by researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. The longer the viewers chose to stay on a site, the more favorable their impressions were. And the part of the homepage they spent the most time examining? The logo. …The lesson here is that bad website design, including a yawn-inducing or irrelevant logo, may compel prospects to jump to your competitors’ sites in the blink of an eye.

Competitive Edge

With the rise of crowdsourcing models and other forms of online innovation, high-quality graphic and Web design services are more readily accessible to the typical business owner than ever before. Design work that used to cost thousands of dollars is now available for a fraction of that. The process is faster and less risky. Consequently, business owners of all stripes are stepping up their games. Generic DIY logos, bland business cards and clunky websites no longer cut it. …Chances are, your competition has gotten wise to the fact that the image they put out there can be a key differentiator and can make them stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Usability

Ineffective design can lead to dissatisfied customers—and as more companies wake up to the importance of design, the worse those who haven’t look by comparison. Many business owners seem to think that the key goal of a design is to make it pretty. But effective, intentional design beats pretty any day. If a visitor to your website can’t quickly find the information she’s looking for, chances are good she’ll either leave in frustration or contact customer service for help.

Return on Investment

Design has a proven ROI. Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen found in a 2008 study that ROI on a website that was redesigned to enhance usability averages more than 80 percent.

Read the entire article originally published in Open Forum.

Add extra spice to your small biz marketing mojo. Join us on The Marketing Mojo Show, a live 15-minute podcast and chat, 3/19/14 at 1p.m. ET. Our topic is Brand Design and Visual Messaging for Small Businesses and features Bernadette Rivell Daniels, an Emmy Award-winning art director, graphic designer and North Florida design firm owner.  Stir the conversation with a response to our question of the month [Q1: Is professional design important and why? #mymarketingmojo]. Tag responses on Twitter with #mymarketingmojo for a chance to hear your comment during the live episode and to participate in the live chat.

Ripped from the Headlines: What Small Businesses Can Learn about Newsjacking from a Bad PR Pitch

It’s New York Fashion Week. Designers, big and small, push the envelope beyond the runway for industry, online and consumer attention. So what could be wrong with a public relations pitch that newsjacks another high-profile event, resulting in worldwide headlines and hashtags? Plenty! It was a gaffe case studies are made of – one that the renowned house of Valentino should long regret. Last week, the designer, via its public relations personnel, sent journalists pictures of a celebrity wearing their goods at the wake for the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Additionally, as reported by the NY Post, the email that accompanied the photos contained a slew of typographical errors. Reaction was swift, and Internet outrage soon followed. The designer has since issued an apology, which we will leave to others to judge its sincerity.

Newsjacking, the art of using news events or stories for marketing and advertising purposes, is nothing new. It gives companies and brands a popular angle and a social, emotional or practical connection to the target audience. In an era of real-time engagement when word-of-mouth spreads like wildfire, newsjacking is an effective weapon for relevancy, as well as, online search engine optimization. In fact, we’re using the window of opportunity to newsjack the Valentino faux pas for this very blog post. But be forewarned and cautious, in death and disaster, there are few exceptions when newsjacking is acceptable or appropriate to push products or services, or handbags for that matter. And there are no excuses for media coverage requests laced with grammatical or typographical errors.

Small businesses can learn a lot from the Valentino debacle and we hope you’ll explore some of these tips and resources to engage prospects and customers, increase brand awareness and favorably influence the bottom line.

Tip: When reaching out to media contacts, keep it short, sweet and proofed. Most journalists and bloggers prefer emails and have little patience for follow-ups and follow-ups to follow-ups. Remember the pitch should not be about you, but, rather how your product or service meets the interests or needs of the contact’s audience.

Resource: The 8 R’s of the Perfect PR Pitch via Bulldog Reporter

Resource: How to Pitch to the Press: The 8 No-Fail Strategies via Forbes

Resource: 5 DIY Public Relations Tips for Startups via Business News Daily

Resource: Before hitting the send button on your next pitch, consider using one of the following platforms to enhance your writing and to review your written material for errors:

• AP Styleguard
• Grammarly

Resource: The Inbound Marketer’s Complete Guide to Newsjacking via Hubspot

Resource:  Newsjacking: 6 Tips for Branded Content

Bonus: This video from best-selling author and marketing strategist David Meerman Scott says it all.

For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest. Maximize your momentum!

LGK’s Stream Pick to Maximize Your Marketing Momentum: Iconic Retailer Meets Real-time

Who says you cannot learn a lesson from an icon, one many consider the great success story of American commerce? From a week of trending (and non-trending) events, people, places and hash tags (check out Hootsuite’s Top USA Twitter Trends of the Week, Vol. 89), we selected a post on Sears, the once dominant iconic retailer, for a bit of insight to maximize your marketing momentum.

Sears starts corporate blog amid rise in unfavorable public and media sentiment. The story via @adage http://t.co/MOtH2CevF8

— LGK Marketing CC (@LGKMarketing) January 23, 2014

Sears (formerly Sears, Roebuck & Co.) has survived longer than most since its mail order heyday; however, the retailer finds itself in the social vortex of real-time engagement. Declining sales, widespread and mounting sentiment on its merchandise and store conditions have not been favorable to the 121-year-old brand. In the midst of a blizzard of negative online comments, as reported by Advertising Age, the company launched a corporate blog. The timing, they claim, was purely coincidental.

There are a few takeaways that immediately come to mind:

• Launch a blog for the right reasons: engagement, transparency, information, education, reputation, not as a platform to hard sell or plead your case in the court of public opinion.
• Your corporate identity is not your corporate reputation. Identity is how you define yourself; reputation is how others perceive you. A periodic image and reputation assessment can help you define areas of strengths, weaknesses and steps for improvement.
• Corporate reputation, built over time, can be destroyed in seconds. Be ready and have a plan in place for threats and events that may have a negative reputation impact.
• Be proactive and responsive. Build relationships, listen to your customers and clients and engage in social dialogue. [In all fairness, according to the Ad Age article, Sears launched a customer-centric campaign, Shop Your Way, four years ago. It has done little to offset the recent backlash.]
• Develop brand advocates internally (employees, management) and externally (customers).
• Toot your horn. Leverage advertising and marketing, including public relations, efforts to create long-term and favorable impressions.

For additional insight, check out this article on reputation management for small businesses on Forbes.com and this LGK YouTube playlist video pick on reputation repair from the Reputation Institute.

Do you have any takeaways to add from our stream pick? What marketing lessons can we learn? Comment below or visit us on LinkedIn, Twitter , Facebook, G+ and share!

For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest. Maximize your momentum!

Bah Humbug, No Ordinary Year-end Marketing Post

‘Tis the time of the year when we’re bombarded with endless lists of tops and bottoms, best and worst, reviews and predictions. With all due respect to the authors, distributors and repurposers – present company included, see LGK’s The Year in Tweets:  2013 Cyber Chatter -we have three tips of wisdom to maximize your momentum now and forever more.

• As simple as it sounds and as simple as it is, by all means, make a plan! Refrain from jumping on the latest marketing trend, tactic or platform without knowing what you want to achieve, how you’re going to get there (time, manpower and budget) and how you want to be perceived by those ultimately responsible for boosting your business and bottom line.
• Do a SELFex (self examination), not a SELFIE. You have to look back to leap forward. Be flexible, make adjustments and tweak – not Twerk (there, we said it) – when necessary.
• Do your marketing thing. Do it well, do it often. Remember that marketing is a process and to be a contender, you have to be “all-in,” focused from conception to delivery to return on investment.

On behalf of the LGK team, I thank you for visiting our blog and wish you the very best in the year to come.

GB O’Brien
Principal

For daily marketing communications news online, subscribe to LGK’s free MarCom Digest. Maximize your momentum!