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Norris Lake Marina Association

The Norris Lake Marina Association (NLMA) was in desperate need for a website overhaul. The organization represents the marinas located on Norris Lake, Tennessee and these same businesses are a vital part of the local economy. The old site did not represent the importance of the organization and the businesses they represent.

KanobiComm teamed up with Graphic Concepts of Cincinnati (who provided graphics) to create a database-driven web site with a simple management system to updated member information.

Visit the site at www.NorrisLakeMarinas.com.

The way to win…

Tim Knight, owner of KanobiComm, has been a print/media consultant for political candidates for the past 10 years. KanobiComm offers all the essential items to conduct a successful campaign:

• Political Yard Signs
• Direct Mail to Registered Voters
• Phone Polls and GOTV Calls
• Push/Palm Card Design and Printing
• Billboard Design
• Web Site Design
• Press Releases
• Media Relations

Is Your Competition Luring You Off Track?

Have you ever had the experience of driving along, paying attention to something off in the horizon and next thing you know, you’ve driven to that spot?  And it wasn’t where you meant to go?

The same phenomenon can happen in your business.  Most business owners I met pay a lot of attention to what their competition is doing.  We definitely need to keep an eye on the competitive  landscape.  But there’s a very fine line.

The danger in keeping track of the other guys is that you lose track of your own path.  We tend to move towards what we pay attention to.  And you don’t want to let your competitors determine your marketing strategy.  That’s a quick way to:

• Deplete your resources
• Look like you’re playing the “us too” game
• Lose the momentum of your key messages

You want to be the leader in your industry, not follow someone else.  The best way to beat your competition isn’t watching what they do.  It’s doing what you should be doing.

If you have and follow a marketing plan — you can enjoy the best of both worlds.  The marketing plan keeps you on your course.  Heading in the direction you have determined.  When you know where you’re headed and keep checking the map to see that you’re on course, you can afford to peek at what the competitors are doing.

Just make sure you’re following your course, not theirs.

marketing plan, marketing strategy

Pimp Your Brand!

Day in and day out we run our businesses the best we can. Like anything else in flux the edges get worn, some things just start to get old. The culture around us is in flux also. Things change and so we must adapt. Summer has come and gone for another year - so it’s time to give the brand an over-haul. Get it ready to take on a fresh new year only a few short months away.

Here’s a 10 point check-list to use to give new life by PIMPING YOUR BRAND:

• Pimp your brand personality. Taking an objective view of the company, has anything changed that defines you differently than when you first started. Maybe you have become more socially minded. Perhaps you find that you have been more generous in donating time to non-profits in your community. If this bears some truth, you can Pimp your brand here by officially embracing philanthropy as a corporate policy. Embrace pet charities and let the world know who you are passionate for.

• Does your brand logo reflect your existing market? Has the demographic aged? If so, perhaps it is time to update it a little. Pimping your Brand logo could mean a complete revise or just a tweak here and there. Smooth out a few wrinkles, refresh its colors and attitude. Your brand image should reflect who your brand is.

• Survey your stake holders to look for any opportunities to embrace and any short-comings to fix. Pimp Your Brand with real world intelligence to make your product or service address true needs. Just asking, strengthens the relationships with each of your shareholder groups.

• Pimp your overall brand image. Do an image audit of the entire company. Make sure that the logo is used consistently every where in the operation. Are the corporate colors also consistent? Do your marketing materials reflect the image correctly? Pimp your brand image to define it.

• Pimp the sales staff. In the course of selling your products or services, does the sales staff reflect the brand correctly. Sit down with the sales team and pimp the deliverable. Raise the bar and win the hearts and minds of the sales staff and their customers.

• As the company leader (the visionary) pimp your attitude. Your employees are inspired or dragged down depending on your attitude. By pimping your attitude, you bring nothing but positive vibes to the company. Even when the economy appears to spiraling down around you, look for the opportunities and display this to the stake holders. A leader who fails to pimp their attitude stands a great chance of losing real talent to the competition.

• Pimp your workplace. Find ways to make the working environment more pleasant. This doesn’t mean more money, but how can you take some of the grey areas out of the work-a-day mix. Look for the little things that make doing the job better.

• Pimp your personal brand. When was the last time you met with your top customers? Call them out of the blue, and ask them for a meeting or lunch to ask them how they are being serviced. Give them a reason to remember you. If you have a retail store, introduce yourself to customers, give them a free coffee coupon at a near by coffee shop. Don’t advertise this - just do it and pimp your brand.

• Pimp your brand product or service. Can anything be made better? Can the delivery of your product or service be improved? For myself, I try to not rely on the impersonal email for ALL my client contact. Where the client is at a great distance I call on the telephone and if they are within an hour or so, I drop in on them. This alone has increased business opportunities. Email has its advantages, but I believe if you rely on it 100% of the time, you are doing it more for YOUR convenience and not for enriching your relationships.

• Pimp your public relations. There is a lot of companies who take public relations as an effort that is only used once or twice in the lifetime of the company. By pimping your PR you can increase your “public” awareness. Utilizing social networking websites can be a fabulous ingredient of your PR mix.

What ever you can do to pimp your brand, can only make you better. The smallest initiatives can have the biggest impact on your brand effectiveness. An eleventh pimp might also be corporate blogging. I’ll shut-up now, as there is so much we all can do to keep the wheels in motion as we pimp our own brands.

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Shipping Out Now: Customers’ Information

I’m surprised this news bite I happened to catch on local TV recently didn’t get picked up more. Recently, a lady called our local TV station, to say that a company whom she purchased from, shipped her order with shredded checks used as cushioning for the product.

That on its own is absolutely not OK. To make matters worse, the shredder didn’t even do that good a job - parts of some checks were still intact. Adding insult to injury, the shredder used was one of those old style strip shredders what were about 1/4 inch wide that even a child could easily piece back together.

According to the reporter, they called the company and the owners said they’ve been “using it for years“, that”this is the first time anybody noticed” and “they’ll stop using it now“.

I shudder to think how many uninterested businesses handle my personal information that way. Just because they have been using it for years and nobody noticed doesn’t make it right. The report did not say if they used their own customers’ checks or worse yet, got those from other businesses. Either way, this is outrageous!

In this advanced, technically inclined world of ours today, businesses like to talk about encryption, securing their web site, protecting customer data, tools and methods to keep hackers at bay and restricting access to customer data. These are all important. I am not discounting that. But all this focus on protecting electronic information is not going to help you much when your paper system is flawed.

Protect your customer data, whether it is on paper, verbal or electronic. It is the law. But really, what should be more important than that - you owe it to your customers.

P.S.: You might want to check out “Protecting Personal Information - A Guide for Business” published by the FTC.

P.P.S.: Upgrade your hardware. 80’s style paper shredders are not good enough. Go for cross cuts or confetti cuts at least. The smaller it can shred the better.

electronic information, hackers, paper shredders

The Talking Logo- What You Really Do for a Living

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You’re at a networking event and someone inevitably asks you….”What do you do for a living?” What do you say?

If you’re like most people you have the generic answer, “I’m in the mortgage business” or “I’m an account executive” or ” I own a small business” and you hand them a business card and then you’re either off to the next person or you’re stuck in a conversation with someone that you have no idea if they have a potential want or need for you and your services.

We have been programmed to answer with either our title or our industry. These types of answers offer little or no marketing value. I don’t think that most people comprehend that these moments are actually the first part of the ‘marketing’ process. Let’s flash back to our definition of marketing- “Getting someone with a need to know like and trust us”. By simply answering with a title or industry we’ve missed a very valuable opportunity to actually qualify them to see if they may have a need.

So what is the solution?

We at Sticky Marketing Systems call it the “Talking Logo”. A talking logo is a carefully crafted reply to the question, “what do you do for a living?”. Your Talking Logo is created in two distinct parts. Part 1 addresses your target market, and Part 2 zeros in on a problem, frustration, or want that market has.

You’ll know you have an effective Talking Logo when you tell someone what you do and they respond “Really, how do you do that?”

For example if someone was to ask me what I do for a living, I could respond ” I teach small business owners and service professionals how to get all the clients they want.”

8 out of 10 times someone will ask, “How do you do that?

I answer them, “I use a simple 7 step process that is endorsed by Harvard Business school and Forbes Business Review, to create and install a marketing system .”

A Talking Logo is a short statement (or question) that quickly communicates your firm’s position and forces the listener to want to know more.

The Formula

Here’s the formula to create your own: action verb (I teach, I show, I help), target market (business owners, plumbers, teachers, home owners), how to xxxx (solve a problem or meet a need).

Once you get clarity and comfortable saying your Talking Logo you can even take it on step further by actually getting the suspect to acknowledge the pain point (hot button) during the conversation.

For example some times I will answer their question of “what do you do for living”, with a question, like this: “You know how some small business owners struggle to get all the clients they want?” [wait for them to acknowledge "yes"] “Well I teach them a system to get all the clients they want”.

You will be amazed at how many people say things like “you know my sister is like that….” or “that sounds like my accountant…”

The formula would be: “You know how some Target Market (business owners, plumbers, teachers, home owners) struggle to xxxx(problem or need), I action verb (show, teach, help) to (solve that problem or meet need).

So go ahead and create your Talking Logo today!!

target market, what do you do for a living

Lights, Camera…Sales?

There are many ways to deliver a marketing message. One that is often overlooked or erroneously dismissed as being too expensive is producing a video. YouTube has changed some perceptions in that arena but not so much in the marketing field.

In reality, the return on the investment can be significant, even if you get a top notch professional to shoot your video. Some of the advantages are:

~ Delivers the intimacy of extended one-to-one communication.

~ Compared to TV ads, non-interruptive.

~ Allows three-dimensional views of products, show a product in use or a service provider in action.

~ With music, action and color, generates emotional impact.

~ Can bring your employees and their passion for your business to life.

~ Can be combined with CD, DVD, or streaming video technology to translate to an easy direct mail piece or web page content.

~ Is a powerful storytelling medium.

Wondering where you can use your video? Your lobby. Your website. Your e-mail campaign. Your annual meeting. Staff recruitment. New business pitches. And that’s just the beginning.

emotional impact, intimacy, perceptions, storytelling, streaming video technology, web page content, youTube

How To Power Position Your Brand!

Positioning your brand is probably one of the most important aspects of branding. It is the unique strategy that will introduce your target audience to exactly what it is that differentiates your product or service from your competitors. I am working with a number of companies right now developing exactly this.

It is absolutely fascinating what gems come out of discussions on positioning. At the outset, many companies are hard pressed to recognize a difference. All they see is the obvious. My strength is that I want to understand how the product or service is delivered, how is it made, what is the experience that surrounds the product or service? Several times the difference is not in the actual product but the delivery of the product or the follow-up. You have to look at the entire product cycle from conception to happy customer and beyond. There is an opportunity in there. You can count on it.

Compliances offer up positioning opportunities. Training offers up positioning opportunities. Frankly there is much to learn from every angle and nuance. For example, I worked with a consumer food product customer. They felt that their fruit product was much like all their competitors across the world. All were grown exactly the same way, with the same ingredients, under similar conditions using the same technologies and marketing and shipping conditions. I refused to believe that there was no opportunity and so I dug deeper into the industry standards. I wanted to know how one product is rated over another. What was intriguing was that the very standards for grading our produce was the opportunity for a very BIG aha moment. Here is the skinny on fruit standards. They are judged on 3 criteria - size, appearance and firmness.

Consider these criteria again: size - appearance - firmness. Is anything missing? I suggested there was and it was huge.

Taste.

You see, taste isn’t a criteria. That is left up to the individual. I suggested that there must be at least a minimum standard that a good sample must taste like. With watermelon, it’s the sweetness - a lemon, its tarty characteristic. Everyone agreed that we were on to something.

Once this particular fruit standard for taste was established, we then contracted the two leading agricultural universities in Canada and the United States to independently develop processes that tested for taste based on the bar we set. While other competing fruit have may won taste competitions judged by consumers, we now have established a definitive test for taste not unlike the the test for size, appearance and firmness. The processes were legally protected and are now proprietary to us.

We were now the ONLY fruit tested for taste!

Our fruit’s taste was now a guaranteed standard of quality NOT based on differing opinions, but on quantitative data. The bar had been raised.

A very compelling difference. This my friends is positioning. In this case the customer had to change how it did business and in doing so, introduced a new standard to their industry. This is not the work of a follower, but a leader.

Positioning can be very powerful if you are savvy enough to recognize the opportunity and bold enough to implement it. The real gems are far beyond the obvious. Look all around the edges of your product or service.

One other small example I will tantilize you with involves a current customer who has a software product. He is in a saturated market where all developers (including them) use one simple digital tool as the basis for determining solutions inherent to the software. If they carry out one small alteration I am suggesting to this simple tool they will instantly make that common tool the achiles heel for every competitor they have - over night.

This is no small boast. When I suggested it, the customer saw the potential immediately. So simple.

Currently the tool has no real value to the software only to say that it has to be there. Much like a car has to have tires to move smoothly over a road - they are important, but they are a given in every model and simply not seen as important or influential enough to warrant a mention in the marketing of a car. This simple tool is such a animal. We are not complete on this yet, so I can’t mention specifics.

My tease is to inspire you look deep into the soul of your product or service and develop a positioning strategy that goes way beyond fancy advertising slogans and resonates with target audiences, by eliminating pain points (defined in a previous article) and making customers want to work with you. A great positioning strategy will excite you, your company and ultimately lead customers to love you.

Are you up to the challenge?

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Help Tech Support, The Sky Has Fallen

It is inevitable. No matter what your business, online or off, technical problems are bound to happen. They will happen without (apparent) rhyme or reason, they will strike at any time - often at most inappropriate times. Yet, many small businesses fail to work out some kind of emergency support.

Here’s what I’m talking about. You are launching a product, tested everything. The first few orders come in without problems but suddenly, all hell breaks lose. Your web site goes down or your order system quits. Irate emails start pouring in. You try to fix it but realize you have no clue what to do.

You call on your trusted developer. Bad news. Since they’ve heard nothing from you nor have you requested to be on their schedule, they’ve booked out their time to other clients who are working on a time sensitive job. She replies she can probably squeeze in an hour to look at the problem end of tomorrow but that’s not a promise of a fix at the end of tomorrow. It’ll all depend on what she finds. On top of that, she’ll have to work around the other clients’ jobs.

One whole day of doing nothing. That’s pure agony. Marketing wise, you may never recover the momentum. You say OK to her but try look for another developer who can look at the problem right now. Maybe ask if your friends on Twitter may know someone. They do and the stand in is hired. But because they themselves are not familiar with your set up, they take more time trying to understand the system, poking around.

Finally, the first developer comes in the next day, fixes the problem in 2 minutes flat. You end up with lots of down time, a ton of stress, lost momentum and 2 bills.

This scenario can so easily be avoided if you had simply negotiated an emergency support option with your existing programmer. And of course, better planning helps.

Most developers know that technical problems to not discriminate nor do they take holidays. Many will help you as soon as they can break free because we know it is frustrating. But a client who always expects you to be there at the drop of the hat during all hours and days of the week is also one who’ll soon be fired.

So what do you do? If you haven’t yet discussed an emergency support plan with your resident techie, do so. Offer to pay a little bit more for being available to you on short notice. You may be paying more per hour for emergencies, but it’ll still be worth it because you have less stress, the problem is taken care of quickly and you don’t look like a poor planner to ‘friends’ on social networks.

Once you have that emergency net set, it’s time to work on the planning. Here are some things you can do to reduce the need to call for emergency tech support.

• When launching anything, always inform tech support ahead of time. If it’s a particularly new item or big launch, something that makes you nervous, consider paying them to be on standby.
• If your web host is upgrading, moving or doing anything. Let your tech team know.
• Keep tech support in the loop. The more they know about what you are working on the easier for them to trace problems.
• Don’t implement anything big during Friday, weekends or holidays if you can help it. If something must be launched for the weekend, makes sure you do a couple of dry runs.

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