Successful Blog

What Could Changes to EU Internet Mean to Your Business?

by

Ideas and Infographics

cooltext443809602_strategy

Changes in European Internet Access

The EU is in a digital race to decrease its dependence on financial services and improve its Internet access. What exactly is on this agenda?

Europe plans on making high-speed broadband connection available to all EU households by 2012 (a lofty goal given the time frame) and a 50% subscription rate of more than 100 Mbps by 2020. Because of the recession, EU countries are fighting to be the first to reach these goals in hopes of opening up opportunities for businesses.

So what does this mean to you? An increase in global Internet usage could mean more international business opportunities for you. To put this into perspective, let’s look at a graphic that visualizes this race.


Click image to open full-size version (via Interxion).

According to the infographic, the UK is leading the pack in the number of consumers purchasing goods online. Moreover, it’s B2B purchasers aren’t that much further behind. Yet despite so many people purchasing goods online (79%), only 15% of businesses are selling goods online.

That means there is a huge demand not being met. So while businesses in Europe are slowly trying to lessen this gap, there is prime opportunity for your business to steal some of the international market share. Especially if you are already in the e-commerce business, there might be an opportunity to gain international exposure easily.

—-
Author’s Bio:
Adria Saracino is a marketer and blogger. When not developing content strategies, you can find her writing about style on her personal fashion blog, The Emerald Closet.

Thank you, Adria!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Influencing Decisions Part 1: 4 Things to Know Before You Propose an Idea

by

IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: Influencing Decisions

Be Prepared to Influence the Results

cooltext443809437_relationships

The CEO was a great thinker. He made his decisions on the facts. As I watched him in meetings as people presented ideas with their best efforts to win him over, I learned a lot about what influences the decision making process.

One of the most important things I learned was what I should know to hedge my bets.

Influence is built on trustworthiness and connection.
To achieve those and meet our goals, it’s important to finely focus on the roads that will take us to our goal and the ways of inviting people to join us that move their mission forward as well.

4 Things to Know to Move Forward Before the Abyss of Next Steps

Whether we work for a huge corporation or sit at a desk in our living room, we can’t be successful without tapping into the influence of others who can help us make our ideas and our projects become real. Yet, we all also know the experience of leaving a meeting or ending a phone only to find that the decision we wanted fell off the table into an abyss called “Next Steps.”

Knowing a few things before we go into those meetings can influence the results significantly by building foundational trust in our competence and connecting our goals to how those we want to help will benefit.

    1. Know your short term purpose. Who are you and what are you building? Too often, we enter a meeting, write a blog post or email, or walk into a meeting without a specific and thoughtful goal in mind. Why are you there? Are you trying to rally support for a new idea? Do you want to change a plan in progress? Are you exploring ways to work together? Are you after funding to research the idea? Will you share something new you’ve discovered? What do you want to be true when the conversation ends?

    2. Know how this project will make the answer you want clear. Know how you’re going to make the project happen. Ask yourself before you meet, “What would be next if the answer is yes.?” Sketch out a plan of action and reasonable estimates for the costs and the resources needed to execute that plan. Do the thinking so that they don’t have to. Present a simple plan that can stand on its own.

    3. Know how your plan will bring relevant and positive results faster and easier. Establish context that makes your goal relevant to the audience you want to enlist. Why are you pursuing this goal and why would the audience want to align their goals with yours? Are you informing a large audience or a small one? How deeply do they need to know the details? ?How will you connect what you want to happen to what already is? How will the proposed project fit into what they’re already doing? How can you make your proposal mission critical to THEIR goals?

    4. Know how your experience will add value and mitigate risk. How will you establish your knowledge base as an expert? If possible, tie the proposed idea or project to something you’ve succeed at in the past. If you can’t, know what you’d expect based on your experience and be able to explain why you’re confident that together you can make this innovative approach a success. Research similar ventures. Be prepared to speak to one or two you know well.

Ideas are fun, but they’re not the genius that builds an economy. For no matter how ideas — genius or not — that get set on the “business table,” it’s the ones founded on solid thinking, realistic plans, and influential support from the right sources that develop into the next awesome technology or killer app we own.

If we do the strategic thinking and develop credible plans before we propose the idea, attracting the influential support of the right people is faster, easier, and more meaningful. In fact it could be said to be irresistible.

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Offline marketing strategies: Back to the basics

by

cooltext443809602_strategy

In the pre-Internet era, business establishments did not have the options to resort to online marketing strategies. Conventional offline marketing strategies such as print advertising, discounts, special promotions, direct mails etc ruled the roost. Like the online marketing strategies, the aim of offline marketing strategies was same – to boost your small business. Anyways, despite the rapid surge of online marketing strategies, the importance of offline marketing strategies can not be denied even in the modern times. Basic offline marketing strategies still play crucial role in expanding your business. Here we discuss about some typical offline marketing strategies which are indeed helpful to boost your small business.

Print marketing

Advertising products and services in print media such as newspaper and magazine is a popular offline marketing strategy. Through advertising your products and services in the newspaper you can reach out to varied classes of people. Again, magazine advertisements aim at targeting a particular sector of the customers such as teens, women or the car lovers.

Broadcast

Radio and television are popular marketing platforms which are still being used very widely. The main advantage of broadcast marketing is that it reaches a large audience at a very quick time. In television advertisements, people can actually see how the products work. However, it is to be noted that advertising through radio and television is comparatively expensive than other forms of offline marketing.

Direct mail

Direct mails are used by many small businesses to augment customer base. This aims at raising the awareness of a product through letters, postcards, brochures and fliers. In direct mail method, a particular type of target market is aimed at. Moreover, this type of marketing strategy is costly too as it involves designing and printing costs.

Referral marketing

If a particular customer is satisfied with the product or the services that you offer, he or she may refer it to other customers. This way your client base increases through word of mouth or referral marketing. However, referral marketing is not any strategic marketing plan but it is useful to build up a loyal customer base. This type of marketing however does not require any cost. You, as the owner of a small business, should not entirely rely on referral marketing. Referral marketing should combine with other forms of marketing so as to reach to a wider section of the market.

Co-branding strategies

Co-branding is a smart offline business marketing strategy. Co-branding implies mutually beneficial marketing agreement between two business units. Two parties that embrace co-branding strategies do not compete with each other, instead the products offered by the two parties complement each other. Through this strategy you can attract those clients which you can not attract through other offline marketing strategies.

Loyalty programs

Even small business units can use these programs to expand customer base. Incentives are given to the customers to purchase more products. For instance, a movie theater owner may offer free movies to the customers on their fifth visit. This way, encouragement is given to the customers to purchase more units of a good.

Discount pricing

This is a very popular marketing strategy to augment your sales. Advertisements of discounts are given in radio, television or in newspapers. Giving bulk discount is a very popular practice. The aim of giving discount is to increase the sale of the product. However, while giving discount you should not compromise on product quality.

These are some offline marketing strategies which are still very much relevant. Even in this online era where increasing thrust is being given on online marketing, basic and traditional offline marketing strategies are very much required to keep your business in good stead. In fact, an ideal marketing strategy should be a judicious mix of both the offline and online marketing strategies.

—-
Author’s Bio:
Alex Brown: Alex is a prolific writer with specialization on various aspects of financial finance. His articles on debt, mortgage industry and personal finance are offer valuable guidelines to the readers.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Build a house made of bricks

by

by
Rosemary O’Neill

cooltext443809558_authenticity

When my dad used to read me The Three Little Pigs, he’d put a lot of gusto into the Big Bad Wolf’s famous threat…”I’ll huff, and I’ll puff….and I’ll BLOW your house down!” He’s an amazing storyteller, and that one has stayed with me. I always strive to assemble bricks, rather than straw.

Every day on the internet, status updates, blog posts, pins, and various pieces of social flotsam and jetsam flow by. You’re probably contributing to the flow yourself. (I know I am!)

Today’s question is…

Are you contributing anything of lasting value, either to your business or to the world?

Take a look at last week’s social output and see whether any of it will:

  • Be true 3 years from now (evergreen content)
  • Add beauty to the world (original artwork)
  • Teach someone a valuable skill (how-to)
  • Build a searchable resource (SEO)
  • Help make your business case (customer support)
  • Lift others up (inspiration)

You’ve heard of the Three Little Pigs …
Which little pig are you?

The house made of straw – you’ve got a Facebook page, which you haven’t updated in a couple of weeks, and a website that’s “brochure-ware” from 2005. They aren’t linked together. You think you’ll get around to fixing it “someday.”

The house made of twigs – you’ve got an up-to-date website, and social accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but the content is not connected, and there’s no editorial calendar, no plan behind it. You spend the day flitting around from one platform to the other, ignoring your core business.

The house made of bricks – your website is an interactive, social hub, with deep resources for your customers. It’s optimized for search, and you put out a steady, consistent stream of varied content. Your audience responds and shares their own related content on your site, building a valuable asset that’s under your control. Your social streams are all accessible from one elegant, branded home.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day social whirl, and never take the time to make a blueprint for your house. My recommendation is to set aside a few hours a week to work on the plan, build an editorial calendar, and be sure you’re building with bricks.

_____

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out their blog. You can find her on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee
_____

DO it Scared

by

by Patty Azzarello

cooltext466496263_leadership

Recently, I keep finding reasons to think about being scared. Or more specifically, getting reminded that being scared is OK.

Successful people spend as much (or more) time being scared as they do feeling confident and comfortable.

The difference is that they do it anyway.

My worst moment…

Here is the story of what might be the worst moment in my career.

I was in my early 20’s and I was a sales engineer. My job was to demonstrate technical products during the sales process.

It was my first week on the job after being trained on one of the two products in our product line. The sales force was not supposed to schedule demos for me for the second (more sophisticated and specialized…”scarier”) product until I had a chance to get the training. So much for “supposed to”…

I found myself in a room of customers who demanded that I do a demo of the product I didn’t know. I told them that I could show them the product, but I wasn’t prepared to do a full demo. So I launched the product and they started firing questions at me. I must have said, “I don’t know, I’ll have to find out and get back to you” at least 30 times. It was humiliating.

Talk about uncomfortable. I don’t think I knew the answer to a single one of their questions. I didn’t even understand the questions. It was painful. I was used to being seen as smart and competent and prepared. I was SO embarrassed. Then it came…

One of the customers said to the sales person in a frustrated, angry tone. ” Why did you bring HER? She doesn’t know anything!”

You know what happened?

I didn’t die.

Yes, it was very painful, and beyond uncomfortable, but it didn’t kill me.
What it did do, was give me a list of 30 important questions customers have about this product.

The next day I sat down with the product manager and asked him to explain to me what those 30 questions meant, and how to demonstrate them in the product.

Within a week I was the second most competent (and in demand) sales engineer to demonstrate that product. By contrast, there were other sales engineers at the company who stayed scared to demo that product, so they never even tried. Their careers did not advance.

Scared is OK

That one experience allowed me to be scared for the rest of my career, but to also know it’s OK. I was genuinely scared every time I got a promotion. I was scared many times in big presentations, meetings or negotiations.

That man’s voice was in my head saying, why did you bring HER. She doesn’t know anything.

But that lesson allowed me to realize:

1. That you can be scared, screw up, even fail, and you will survive.
2. That failure-learning cycle is far more valuable than the safe, not-doing-it approach, where you learn and accomplish nothing.
3. Over time it get’s easier. If you force yourself to act when you are scared, every time it gets easier to act when you are scared.

In brief — do it scared.

Scared and Successful

Ultimately, I was able to be scared, and still perform really well most of the time. My way of working would be to push forward, be scared, and do it anyway.

I still cringe sometimes. I am not perfect. I forget things, and get thrown off sometimes. But now when that happens I always think about what I learn from the minor embarrassment and feedback. It makes me better next time, and forever after. I would not improve without some amount of trial and failure.

If you never put yourself out there, you never get the feedback, practice, insight, and ideas to tune what you are doing to be more successful. You just stay stuck.

And it’s also important to realize that if you mess up a few times in dozens or hundreds of outings, it has no impact whatsoever on peoples’ impression of you. Those moments just fade away as you replace them with the improved, excellent ones.

Fear and Competence

People who are not held back by fear have broken the link between fear and competence.

What I mean by this is that some people when they feel scared, have a tendency to think that is a sign that they are not worthy. They think…

If I am scared and I feel vulnerable, that must mean by definition that I am not good enough to be in this situation.

This is not how successful people think. Successful people break the link and say something instead like…

I feel scared and vulnerable, so it’s going to be harder than I expected to put myself out there. Damn, I guess I have to do it anyway.

It breaks my heart when I see gifted people hold themselves back because they are too nervous to step forward.

One woman in particular I am thinking of did some breakthrough medical research, but was not comfortable being the one to present it. Guess what happened.
The presenter claimed the credit and she got pushed aside. What should have been a breakthrough moment in her career turned into a setback.

The invisible risk

Staying in the background because it is more comfortable, does nothing. It adds no value, you don’t learn, and you fade into the background. In terms of being vulnerable, in reality you are much more vulnerable if you are invisible, than if you are out there.

Being out there and being imperfect, trying to move things forward, and committing to contribute is actually a much less risky way to behave in your career.

Leaders Step Forward

It’s not about being flashy or having a big personality. Leaders drive outcomes and then they communicate about them. Even the most humble, introspective, introverted leaders put themselves out there when they need to. And it is very powerful.

The power comes from showing that you are taking ownership for the outcome of the communication, not from the song and dance. Leaders step forward and show others that they care.

I saw a TED talk by Dr. Brene Brown about Vulnerability and Shame. I’ve included a link below, it’s really worth watching, but I wanted to point out a couple of things that really struck me on this topic of fear and success.

1. Everyone feels vulnerabilty and shame

Everyone. Not just some people. Not just most people. Everyone. If you are human you feel shame (unless you are a psychopath).
So there you have it. Vulnerable or Pshcyopath.

I found that very comforting. To think because I feel scared, I am not good enough, makes no sense – because everyone is in the same boat. Another reason to do it anyway.

2. There is no Creativity or Innovation without fear

There is no success without failure. Great ideas and big successes come from people who are willing try, fail, and keep going. Good ideas stem from bad ideas. Failure is necessary to progress.

Do it scared, and you might get someplace.

The words she uses, which I really like are “Daring Greatly”.

Here is the link to Dr. Brene Brown’s talk “Listening to Shame”.

Her research and her talk are about much more than these two points. It’s worth the time…

What about you?

When have you been scared or failed, built success out of it. Please leave your story in the comment box below.

—–
Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advisor. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello. Also, check out her new book Rise…

Successful-Blog is proud affiliate of

third-tribe-marketing

Influence and Intimacy: 5 Solid Ways a Key Customer Strategy Grows Business Faster

by

IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: Strategic Foundation

Let Everyone Build for Every Customer

When I took the job at the small publisher, it had been losing over 10% in revenues ($millions) every year for the past three years. It was a dream job, I would get to conceive and drive the strategy that would turn the company around and build a customer base of fiercely loyal fans. For them, it was a moment of truth, the company had recently downsized by more than 50%. For me, it was an “Ok, big shot moment. Let’s see what you’ve learned from all that experience.”

I read all of the current product. Over the years, every product had somehow come to be defined by the same 5 buzz words and were for the same customer group — defined as all teachers inside and outside the classroom. I realigned and differentiated it so that teachers could choose the product that best suited their classroom situation.

Then I chose the first new product we would publish and it raised some alerts. The 20 manuscripts I had selected were from an Australian publisher. They were written at a 7-year-old reading level, but were far too racy for 7-year-olds in American schools.

The Founder of the company said, “These books are … um … a little irreverent.”
The President of the company said, “Yes, I’d describe them as irreverent too.”
I said, “And that’s exactly why we’re going to publish them.”

They said things like

  • Parents of second-grade kids would go ballastic if 7-year-old brought these home.
  • Second-grade kids will never understand these.
  • Second-grade teachers will never buy these.
  • States will never fund these.

I replied something like

Every publisher is building books for every kid. And they’re not intimately close to any of them.
We’re going to publish these books for the 13-year-old boys reading at a 7-year-old level.

And so Second-Chance Reading was born.

5 Solid Ways a Key-Customer Strategy Grows a Business Faster

The situation was clear. The investors were unhappy at the downward moving growth curve. A turnaround was imperative for survival. We needed to grow the business quickly and meaningfully. The strategy was simple. Get clearly-defined product to market that would attract a fiercely loyal key customer group.

By identifying teachers of severely vulnerable students — 13-year-old boys reading seriously below level — as a key customer group, we were taking advantage of these 3 solid ways to grow a company faster, easier, and more meaningfully.

  1. Focus is attractive: You can build a website and an offer that shows you know your key customer deeply. If you serve everyone, you serve no one well. I want a company that wants me as a customers. When I walk into a hotel or a restaurant or visit a website, I know immediately if it was designed with people like me mind. Trying to build a location or a website that appeals to everyone flattens the attraction. Teachers, gamers, and CEOs don’t share expectations or sensitivities. Focusing clearly on the key group you will serve means that when they arrive they’ll see immediately that you “get” them intimately.
  2. Intimacy leads to expertise: You get to know the problems. A teacher, a farmer, and a CEO have problems in common. However, those problems play out on different fields with different rules. When you focus on a clear key customer group, such as all teachers of 7th graders who read below level, you see the same problems across similar situations. You get to know the issues and what triggers them deeply. You develop strategies that serve the customer more meaningfully because you’re intimate with their needs, desires, and restrictions.
  3. A clarified group: Your impact is spread more quickly. If you work with one teacher, one farmer, and one CEO, your impact is diluted by the simple fact that teachers, gamers, and CEOs rarely talk business to each other. Three teachers of 7th-grade students who read below level are much more relational. They’re much more likely to trade techniques, offer support, and share success stories. They’ll tell their friends about you.
  4. Simple shareability: You are easier to share. Whether it’s a networking room at the Four Seasons in NYC or conversation on Twitter, a key customer strategy keeps you top of mind, much like a key word keeps you top of Google. If you are well-known for one thing, much like Oprah is known for being a talk show host, the minute someone mentions that one thing in conversation, I think of you and your product or service.
  5. Thoughtful extendability: You can build out infrastructure and customer base simultaneously. Having a key customer focus grounds a strategy that allows you to build a solid foundation. From that foundation, you can move out to people who know the first key customers — their friends, partners, vendors and other relations. The marketing effort it takes to extend to these new groups — for example: 8th grade teachers of students reading below level, parents of 7th grade students reading below level, teachers of 7th and 8th grade students who need reading practice — is less costly and less risk than developing a fully-new market and your reputation precedes you. Your business can project when to enter the market and what the return will be on investment.

Whether your business is a corporation or a sole proprietorship, a key customer strategy keeps the most loyal of your fans close, limits risk, and raises your visibility to grow your business faster, easier, and more meaningfully than any simple campaign might.

Campaigns make sales.
Relationships build businesses.
Deep relationships are irresistible.

What are you doing to build a stronger key customer strategy for your business?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!