Successful Blog

Do Your Customers Speak Your Language?

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The teacher sent me a lengthy email about the upcoming DBQs the kids would be working on, as well as the IGPs that were coming up. While I appreciated the proactive communication, I had NO IDEA what she was talking about.

I’m picking on educators because she was in the top of my inbox this week. But it’s not just educators who use “inside baseball” jargon.

Your industry probably has concepts, acronyms, and special names that mean something only to insiders. If you’re sprinkling them into your marketing communications and content, you may be talking straight over the heads of your prospects and customers.

Remember, this problem can pop up in your emails, marketing copy, website content, presentations, sales materials, and verbal communications (like product demos or pitches).

5 Ways to Get out of the Jargon Trap

  1. Run your copy through a readability tool or jargon detector. Many of these tools are free online, and you can get a paid subscription if you write a lot of copy. While you’re at it, check for buzzwords too!
  2. Show it to someone outside your industry as a “sanity check.” It’s great to have an editor as a second set of eyes, but if your editor is someone who sees through the eyes of your target customer, even better.
  3. Spell out the first instance of any acronym. Especially in long-form writing, don’t assume that your reader knows the meaning of your acronyms. Spell it out the first time, and then use the acronym afterwards. Ideally, limit your use of acronyms in the first place!
  4. Do more reading outside your industry bubble. Don’t get caught in the rut of only reading industry insider journals, blogs, and news. The more you permeate your thoughts with the limited culture of your particular niche, the less you will notice the buzzwords and jargon. It will be normalized for you. Make an effort to consume content that is outside your comfort zone.
  5. Pay close attention to the way your customers write and speak. Set up a repository in your notes where you can track key words and phrases they use (bonus – these can then also become keywords if you’re running ad campaigns). This will help you write in the voice of your customer, which will feel familiar and attractive to prospects.

Conclusion

Writing is a critical skill, whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, creator, or small business owner. Incorporate some routine checks before you hit “publish,” and you’ll be speaking your customer’s language in no time.

Photo by That’s Her Business on Unsplash

Does Fun Lead to Funding?

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Things have been serious lately.

But my spidey senses are telling me that there’s a lot of pent up desire for fun, flamboyance, and originality.

If you’re having fun, you attract other people who also want to have fun.

What does this have to do with entrepreneurship, or building a business?

If you’re struggling with getting attention or traction in your business, try injecting some chaos, some fun, some of your own unique personality or life experience into it.

This is one reason TikTok is exploding; it’s a never-ending stream of raw personality. Most TikTok creators don’t do a lot of polishing, in fact, the more raw and real, the better. It’s common to find a business expert doling out tips while putting on their face of makeup.

The new world of marketing and business-building offers a Golden Corral sized buffet of tools and venues to express your mission and brand. Don’t be afraid to experiment with some of them. 

Life is not a dress rehearsal. You should be playing full-out, without worrying about the judgment of others.

Follow the Fun, the Money will Chase You

For example, there’s a friend-group of women who jumped into the wilderness of Clubhouse (the audio-only app) and decided to create a dating-game style “show” on the platform just for kicks. 

When most of the conversations on Clubhouse were boring, “How to Get Rich Today” style, these women started “NYU Girls Roasting Tech Guys.” They’re now contemplating brand deals and sponsorships for a business that invented itself because they were having fun.

If you’re struggling against the voice inside your head that doesn’t want you to have fun because it might be embarrassing, watch this video.

Homework

  1. Do an hour without input (https://www.deprocrastination.co/blog/block-out-input-free-time)
  2. Write down 3-5 things you used to do as a kid, but you don’t do anymore. Sometimes those old hobbies and interests are still lurking there in the background. Do I need to mention Gary Vee’s sports cards and garage sale content?
  3. Read through the latest marketing copy, emails, website content, or customer responses you’ve written. Could you shift those words to be more real, more fun, less jargony and corporate? Take a peek at two brands I have a fun-crush on: Goodr and Chubbies for inspiration.

Let’s Get Real. And Fun. And Really Fun.

In the name of realness, I’ll tell you that one reason you haven’t been hearing from me on this blog for a while is that losing Liz Strauss (our fearless founder) really socked me. I needed time to process, time to re-read her book, time to figure out the path forward with my own writing. And I can feel her not-so-gentle nudge to “just do it.”

Thank you for reading, and for being part of this community.

I hope to get back to a regular weekly posting schedule here, so feel free to comment with your questions and thoughts.  And ideas for having fun while making a living.

Photo by Josiah Gardner on Unsplash

How to Use What You Have

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The baby beaver scurried back and forth between the shower stall and the doorframe. Between his teeth was a mop.

Then came a bucket and some other household items, creating a makeshift dam-like structure in the doorway. He was intent on his task, spending quite a long time constructing and tweaking the arrangement of the items.

His human “mom” was exasperated but understanding. You see, “Beave” is a rescued baby beaver. The rehabber is encouraging him to perform his instinctive tasks, even if it blockades her bathroom.

I encountered Beave and his mom on TikTok. The other people in the comments suggested that she give him building blocks, to see whether his construction would be more solid.

No, Beave wasn’t interested. Instead, he continued bringing household items from all around the home, building a beautifully messy “dam” made of buckets, toys, shoes, and anything else within baby beaver-reach.

It doesn’t have to be perfect.

There’s not even any water.

What can you do today, with the resources at your command?

If you’d like to obsess about Beave with me, you can find him @beaverbabyfurrylove on TikTok, or on their channel on YouTube: Raising the Wild.

Raising the Wild, Beaver Rehab

Customer engagement on a budget

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Customers typically want two things when they seek out your company online:

  • fast answers to their questions
  • someone to listen to them

If you’ve delegated your customer engagement to a “free” social network, you’ve automatically made it more difficult to accomplish either of those goals.

Have you ever tried to search for something that was posted a while ago in a Facebook Group? You know, that amazing answer you wrote to that customer who wanted to know if you offer discounts to dog owners? Go ahead and try it…I’ll wait…

No bueno, right?

Now try digging up a Tweet or a Twitter DM in your corporate account from a month ago where you solved that nagging login question.

See what I mean?

What if you had a space that you controlled, where you and your customers could easily find answers? A forum gives you a central hub, connected to your website, where PDFs, images, tutorial videos, Q&A, ideas, and more can be found.

The bonus? If you’re using your own domain, all of that useful information is also helping your SEO.

Some customers who have incorporated your brand into their identity (how awesome is that) may want to reinforce that by helping other customers. Research shows that customers who participate in an online community stick around longer than those who don’t.

revenue attributed to community members

This article will show, using Convolio forums as an example, how you can engage with your customers like a boss (even if you’re an army of one). These same tips apply, regardless of your community platform; the bottom line is to provide value to your customers.

Make Your Customers Insiders by Sharing Useful Resources

Set aside one of your forums for resources. You can attach files, embed media, and include pull quotes in your forum topics, which makes it easy to share all sorts of information in one place. It’s all searchable (including the attached files)!

Your customers will appreciate being able to comment or ask questions inline too. For example, if you post the menu for your upcoming event, they can ask whether there are gluten-free options (that’s always the first question, isn’t it?).

Collaborate with Your Customers by Getting Feedback and Suggestions

The only bad feedback is no feedback at all. Whether you’re building a product or providing a service, you should always be listening when your customers tell you things. You can give them space to offer constructive criticism, ideas, and real use-case responses. Because it’s a forum, you can actually have a back-and-forth conversation about the idea, gathering more details to flesh it out, and getting input from multiple different customers in the same thread. Best practice is to go back and let them know once you’ve implemented their idea. Customers who have contributed their own ideas to your business, and seen them come to life, become your most loyal fans.

Communicate Proactively and Specifically

You should be sorting and segmenting your members so that you can send customized emails based on their interests, or introduce them to other customers who have similar interests. When they join the forums, give them a quick dropdown menu to tell you something about themselves. That information then gets you closer to knowing them as people, and then being able to give them what they actually want, rather than just guessing at personas.

Create a New Revenue Stream with Premium Memberships

Use paid memberships to monetize your forums. Offer enhanced features or content to paid members of your forum community. You get to decide the rate, the frequency, and what is included in the membership. When you are offering so much value through your forums that members are willing to pay, you’re doing it right.

See How it’s going, At a Glance

You don’t have to be a Google Analytics junkie to see how your forums are doing. Use built-in Advanced Reports to see your member leaderboard, top topics, and more. In Convolio, it’s all downloadable if you want to go all spreadsheet on it.

How does this serve your customers? Double down on the topics that are seeing the most traction. If forum content that offers how-to information is getting the most page views and comments, make more of it!

Clone Yourself with Automation Tools

The secret recipe is….Recipes! In Convolio, you can automatically screen out posts that include specific words, take a look at posts that include images before they go live, reply to someone who’s made their first post, and ban spammers who get in the way of real customer engagement. Use your community’s moderation tools to create a fun, interactive space for your customers.

Subscribe to administrative email notifications and get alerted when new members join, when someone mentions you, or when there’s new content that needs review. That means you can spend more time working on your real job, which is making cool things for your customers, not dealing with forum technology.

Conclusion

It’s time to stop blurting out marketing messages all over the web, and hoping your customers will bump into them. Time to provide real value for them, in a place where you can give customers the experience that fits your business promise, without algorithms dictating your reach.

Convolio is the new low-cost hosted forum from Social Strata, the pioneers of engagement software. Some other forum options include Discourse (open-source software) and Vanilla Forums (priced  for the Enterprise).

How are you engaging with your customers?

 

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is Co-Founder of Social Strata, makers of Convolio forums and the Hoop.la community platform, and Narrative, a new social content platform for consumers.  You can find Rosemary on Twitter as @rhogroupee.

Featured Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

Book Review: Wise Guy, by Guy Kawasaki

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If you’ve spent any time in marketing or business development, you’ve certainly heard of Guy Kawasaki.

You might think of him as the ex-Apple guy, or perhaps the first person you ever knew to hold the title “Chief Evangelist” as a professional job. You might have seen him speak at an event, or heard about his famous 10-20-30 pitch rule: “no more than 10 slides, not using anything smaller than a 30-point font, and keeping presentation time to 20 minutes.”

But do you know anything about his journey to becoming “Guy Kawasaki?”

And why is he always smiling?

The introduction to Wise Guy says it’s not an autobiography, and it’s not. It’s a fantastic ride through Guy’s life and lessons-learned, as only he can write.

Read a book

In rough chronological order, Wise Guy takes the reader into Guy’s childhood in Hawaii, which laid the groundwork for both his work ethic and his love of surfing. The anecdotes from his life story are followed by one or more tidbits of wisdom, denoted by the “shaka” symbol (you might know it as the Hawaiian hand gesture that roughly means “aloha” or “right on”).

For all of the writers in our Successful Blog community, Guy recommends a great book called, “If You Want to Write,” by Brenda Ueland. Its primary takeaway is…just write! You don’t have to wait for permission, or a book deal, or anything else. If you write, you’re a writer.

The through-threads in Wise Guy are joy, kindness, and humility. That makes for a “business book” that is only tangentially about business, but all about business. I’d recommend reading this book to anyone who’s feeling a bit stuck in their career, a bit unfocused, or a bit depressed about their achievements. It’s a hit of fresh air.

In case you’re thinking it’s just a series of aphorisms and feel-good quotes, that’s not the deal. One very clear aspect of Guy’s life is his no-nonsense approach. He learned to tell the brutal truth at the side of Steve Jobs, and says that “the foundation of evangelism is a great product.” There are plenty of “evangelists” out there who are colorful foils for sub-par products, but they are doomed to fail. Guy’s mantra is all about working hard, proving yourself, and paying your dues.

I’d recommend reading this book through once, and then bookmarking the lessons that you need to hear more than once. It’s the style of book that you can refer back to, if you find yourself in a professional situation that feels daunting.

You’ll be happy having Guy’s shaka at your fingertips.

 

Wise Guy: Lessons from a Life
by Penguin Group (USA) LLC
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DBPNK41/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_QecBCb2RV4X1N

Disclosure: I received a free digital copy of Wise Guy for the purposes of writing a review. 

 

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who is CEO of Narrative, a new social content platform coming in beta in April 2019.  You can find Rosemary on Twitter as @rhogroupee.

Are you Making Mistakes with Your Customer Data?

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Customer data is one of the keys to running a successful business. In order to provide great service, you must know as much as you can about your target audience, the people in your “funnel,” and those who have actually purchased from you.

It used to be that you could collect tidbits at any time, any place, via cookies, online forms, customer surveys, etc., without much regard for what happens to the data after it’s collected.

That is no longer the case.

The smart business owner now views customer data as belonging to the customer. This requires a mindset shift:

  • Only collect information that is specifically needed, to serve a business purpose
  • Always tell the customer what you’re going to do with it
  • Make a plan to protect and keep the information secure
  • (Ideally) allow the customer to view, edit, and delete the information

When you start with the idea that the consumer’s data belongs to them (and you’re just a custodian), you’re on a better path to deal with any potential regulatory challenges that might arise.

Regulations like the EU’s GDPR and California’s new Consumer Privacy Act are only the beginning of the global shift that’s happening. Consumers and regulators alike have been driven to action by sloppy data collection and sharing practices, and now it’s time to to establish new best practices.

What does this mean for a solo entrepreneur or small business owner?

  • First, keep yourself informed of changing data protection rules in your state, country, or region. If you belong to any professional organizations, that can help you stay on top of relevant news. When GDPR went into effect a couple of months ago, you wouldn’t have been able to avoid the news unless you “went ostrich.” So don’t give in to the temptation to just bury your head in the sand and hope it goes away.

 

  • Second, take a look at the customer information you have. Even if you aren’t subject to any regulations (contractual relationships often legitimize data retention in the rules), you might want to purge outdated information, or data you no longer need. Double check that you’re maintaining good security over the data (both technologically and physically). Establish good “housekeeping” processes to delete information when a customer leaves (perhaps after a specific period of time). And make sure you’re transparent with all of the above.

 

  • Third, start thinking about privacy by design. It doesn’t have to be a highly technical, structured system. It’s really an approach. If you put your customers’ privacy foremost in your mind when you’re working on a new marketing campaign, purchasing new CRM software, or working with a new partner, you’re already ahead of the game.

This article is not legal advice, and I don’t play an attorney on TV. If you’re handling sensitive information (medical, legal, financial) you certainly should consult with your own legal advisor to ensure that you’re doing it right.

 

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who is CEO of Narrative, a new social content platform coming in beta in Q4 of 2018.  You can find Rosemary on Twitter as @rhogroupee