Success Is Determined Before You Start

In racing, business and life, success is determined before you ever start.  What do I mean by this?  Steven Covey in his famous Seven Habits book said to "Begin with the end in mind".  He was right.

If you don't read the entire book though, you might skip a few steps.  Recently I had the pleasure of sitting down with Tyler Tadevic of TruSpeed Motorsports.  Tyler and Team Owner Rob Morgan had just returned from the Rolex 24 hours at Daytona.  A race nearly 3000 miles from their home turf.

Winning Daytona is an amazing feat.  Just finishing is a major accomplishment for any racing team.

Tyler and I spend nearly an hour talking about the race, and looking at the car.  The car that TruSpeed entered came home a total loss.  The engine was hanging on by a thread, even though no one could see it.  If you grabbed the alternator you could shake the engine.  Several parts of the car were missing due to contact with other cars and stationary objects as well.  It looked like one tired pony.

Tyler was beaming and with good reason.  TruSpeed left their home in Orange County's Costa Mesa and headed east with one goal.  Finish.  Tyler and Rob were smart enough to recognize the height of the challenge they were undertaking and set a goal that was just out of reach for many teams.

56 teams started the race at the 2013 24 hour race at Daytona, and not all of them finished.  Even experienced teams couldn't make it the entire 24 hours.  Daytona is a shining example of why endurance racing is different.

TruSpeed is probably best known for Driver Patrick Longs record winning season in 2011.  Those are "sprints" according to Tyler.  Daytona is a marathon.

TruSpeed didn't finish Daytona by showing up and racing.  They started planning long before getting to the track and analyzed every decision based on the one goal.  Finish the race on the track.

The method that Tyler Tadevic and Rob Morgan used to put together the right plan with the right car and the right drivers to finish Daytona works in business and marketing too.  When you have a single target like "Finish the race on the track" or "Be the best Pizza Place", you can look at everything you do and very quickly and effectively see if it is working or not.

When I say this applies to everything I mean everything your business does.  If you are a plumber who specializes in being the fastest and lowest cost water softener installer, you can quickly look at your trucks, your email campaign, your direct mail post cards and your website and say "does this say we are the best water softener guys period?".  If not dump it and start again until everything you do reflects your one thing.

What is your single mission for this year, or what is your business target?  does your advertising say that?  Ask potential customers to make sure, because we all tend to see what we want to see, not what we are really doing.

Profile or Page - What Should Your Business Have

As Social Media morphs into it's next phase, Google + and Facebook have a couple of similarities the market is coming to expect.  Simply put, people have profiles, businesses have pages.

So what is the difference.  On Facebook, a profile is supposed to be a website for a single human.  You are limited in how many friends you can have, however you can have a lot of subscribers.  A subscriber is a follower you don't necessarily know.

A page on the other hand is designed for business.  On both Google + and Facebook a page has several business friendly features such as displaying hours, phone numbers and a map in a mobile friendly format.  Every business owner should have a page for their business.  After all they are free.

If you want to know more, check out the book "How To Market On Facebook For Free" or "How To Market On Google + For Free".  Both available as an e-book on Amazon.

Are You Marketing Or Advertising With That Cool Website?

Marketing and Advertising are two terms most small business owners interchange.  They don't really understand the difference, and it does make a big difference to your business.

The cost of creating a cool website today really isn't much when you look at the overall cost of running a business.  Better yet, the cost of advertising online  and putting your business name and logo in front of millions of people every day is now possible for less than 1 seconds worth of the time a Super Bowl ad runs.

So why do companies run Super Bowl ads?  For Budweiser the answer is simple.  The Super Bowl ads have moved from advertising to marketing.  Their customers expect it and for them the return is measurable.  Most of the rest of the companies are just advertising, plain and simple.   

Advertising is simply getting your name in front of people with the "hope" that they remember who you are at the right time.  The real truth is the brain doesn't quite work that way.  We are much more abstract than that.  If I ran an ad for Scotts' Best Chocolates often enough, the most likely thing that will happen is people will want  chocolate and then buy their favorite chocolate, or the best packaged chocolate on the shelf when they decide to buy.  

That packaging by the way is marketing, not advertising, and here is why.  Advertising is the initiator that starts someone in a direction.  It is extremely expensive to do.  TV ads, blind ads online, billboards and bus stops are all advertising.  Your message gets to the most people regardless of whether they are ready to buy or in a buying mood.  Marketing is grabbing their attention any time they are in the sales funnel.  Standing at the candy counter is definitely in the funnel, and the packageing might be just the thing to get them to buy one chocolate over the other.

Some well done ads can have a media or subliminal effect.  Food and Beverage ads are the best at that.  My wife says she can tell if I see a Diet Coke, Coke or McDonald's ad because of my Pavlovian response and need to get a Diet Coke.  She once joked that my response was so strong, I will signal to enter McDonald's while driving down the road with a Diet Coke in my hand.

For most small businesses, advertising is a waste of time.  You advertise because everyone else is and you feel like you have too.  Well the truth is you don't.  It is possible to do very little advertising and a lot of marketing and do just fine.

There is a difference based on the size and the age of a business.  It is possible after 10 years of advertising  in a specific neighborhood, that an insurance salesman's' ad becomes his marketing.   Some changes will naturally occur, or he will gently move from advertising to marketing if he is listening to the market and might not even know it.

So what is the difference between Marketing and Advertising?

Marketing is the act of reaching customers who have entered the sales funnel for your product.  If you advertise often enough and consistently enough, you might start getting people in your sales funnel.  

This method works for local service companies like auto repair, insurance and real estate agents.  The expense of doing it is why many people in those industries fail.  The trick is to Someone else's advertising might have done it and you don't care.  The small business owners mission as it pertains to marketing is simply to be in front of them in some form when they are ready to buy.

When long term advertising turns into marketing, competition is effectively locked out, so it is important to start a small and consistent ad campaign

Marketing and Sales go hand in hand.  Their combined purpose is to get your product or service in the hands of your customer and the customers money in your bank account.  Plain and simple.  Every step of a sales funnel is geared this way, and every "Ad" used in marketing should be geared this way.

Small business owners have a love hate relationship with a little split test we do.  A split test is where you create two chains of events and change just one thing to see what happens.  The thing I like to change is the website.  If they have a super fancy website with lots of flash graphics and video, the owners are like a proud papa, and love showing it off.

Over the years I have had to tone down my approach because being "right" doesn't always get me more customers.  Early on I would proudly bet the customer I could improve internet presence and marketing performance with a more simple website.  I don't mean plain, boring, I just mean more simple.  Then I would run the exact same ads, and link them to the two sites, each with a different phone number to see how many calls we get.  After all as a marketer for a service business, all I can do is get them to call.  The last step of the sales funnel is up to you to get them in the door with their wallets open.

Lately, I have had to really back off the presentation and directness of my approach.  Business owners don't like to be shown they are wrong, they want to learn a better way.  Learning takes time, and it has taken me several years to understand that.  I have always felt that as their marketing consultant, my job was to give them the best bang for the buck period.  It turns out that isn't what any business owner really wants.

These days my approach is very different and much more effective at catching and keeping new clients.  The end result is the same, it just takes longer and yet customers are happier because they truly understand.  Many times they end up telling me the right things to do just from observing the changes we make for them online and what happens with those changes.

The back end of my approach is still the same.  After understanding the client and their customers, I build a target schema.  I then gently try to work a little more of the target into the marketing instead of letting them run shotgun style all over the place.  Over time, it becomes obvious what the business is really good at and what the customers really want from them.

The entire mission of small business marketing, or any business marketing for that matter is about connecting with potential new clients, staying connected with current clients and re-connecting with old clients.  Being cool online is just being cool, and doing both is expensive.