Marketing for small businesses

We're lucky enough today to have Tom, a former CMO of a fortune 500 company with us and Tom is going to talk to us about marketing for small businesses. Welcome Tom.

So there's really not even a good definition. So I think you've sort of said it right, which is, if you feel like your small business, you probably are, and the biggest indicator that is is usually employment. So if you have a low number of employees , um, and you find yourself strapped for budget, right? Every dollar Scott account, that's a pretty good, a pretty good surrogate for what a small businesses. So yeah, there's a massively different approach when you're doing that.

Then, you know, if you're Coca Cola, of course in your marketing budgets, $300 million, it's all over the place.

So that takes a , it's really a big shift. It's a, there's a famous book, it's called guerrilla marketing. I recommend it to everyone. It's not gorilla like the champ . It's gorilla like warfare. Even though this is not a warfare book. Um , I suggest everyone goes and gets it because it's specialized around , uh , marketing tactics and differentiators that don't cost a lot of money. And that's where small business have to go.

So the, the , the discussion shifts immediately from a corporate ad agencies and a large , uh , websites going up on one product all the way down to now. It's what can I do with my business card, right? How am I going to use that as a way to differentiate? And that's kind of the , the theory around guerrilla marketing and a lot of what we talk about. So I'll take that example, right? So , uh, just with business cards, everyone's got them .

And in small business you have to think about how do I break out, right? Uh , I'm giving business cards out and an association, I'm part of a , uh , an area triangle , small business group. Uh, I give them out on my counter to my customers if I'm in the medical service or tires or brakes , right? So [inaudible] guerrilla marketing approach would be, just think for a second. Every tire and brake store in wake County , uh , probably has the service manager's business card on the counter.

They all do. So what would make that one small experience a little bit different? And there's small things. You do rounded corners on the card . Instead of square, you do a circular card. Instead of a score , you take a card and you put a real funny picture on it , uh, that makes people stand out and go, Oh, and they get a little chuckle. It's still got your name and your phone number and your address on it. So it's that kind of differentiation.

It doesn't cost you much more money, if any more money at all. Uh , to put up a picture of something that's funny. Uh, take another example. Outside of , uh , people see this all the time outside of a lot of businesses, you have signs and you can do the lettering , uh , yourself to change Shay sale today, 15%.

Well, an Epic tactic in that is a lot of companies will take those signs, they'll put a joke of the day or they'll put something funny on it that's really engaging and what happens, and it kind of goes to word of mouth marketing. People start talking about, well, you see that, that uh, uh, that guitar store and they always got the funny sign out front every week the guy puts up a different joke, things like that. That doesn't cost you anything. It's an asset you already have.

Can you recall , uh, any funny advertising that you've seen? We could, we could use the chuckle today. Uh, I had a heavy subject. I saw a business that had their mailbox on the road, oddly enough. It's not the sign, but it came right to mind when you said it. Um , and instead of a mailbox, they had taken a , a big pole and they put three mailboxes on it. And uh , there was a real little one at the top and it said , uh , letters for my sweetheart.

And there was one in the middle , uh, that said mail from friends. And then they took a 50 gallon , uh, uh, a barrel , uh , metal barrel and they painted it black and the sign on that one said bills. So it was just funny. And I remember forever, in fact, it was a fish and tackle bait and tackle kind of a shop and it was somewhere in Michigan. But I will never forget that. And I saw that maybe , uh , gosh, nine , 1979 is when I never left me. So it's a great one.

I could still sorta remember it was in st Joseph, Michigan and I bet if I saw it again, I'd note it suddenly . So the thought there would be maybe somebody would say, Hey, you ought to try that tackle shop that has the big barrel that says bills on it. Yeah. And it might come across differently than that. Not even you might try it. It's just people start talking, Hey, did you see , uh, Joe Smith's , uh , bait and tackle shop? And he's got that great thing out.

All you want is people, st Joe Smith's doesn't even need to be a recommendation. You're getting free advertising all over the local community, which is all small businesses care about. And it's great because it lends something different and we'll go fancy and say that's a differentiation. And that's what marketing is all about. How do we get out of the cloud and break through the clutter? So maybe small businesses should look for some kind of buzz around them. Yeah. Uh, I would agree.

Uh, I don't know where the buzz comes from. This is , uh , oftentimes people kind of get into that mode and they, they can't get stuck. Oh, I need viral. Right? I'll take viral as buzz today. Someone create me a viral thing. Well, your brain seizes up. No one can think what's viral because viral is not really manufactured. It just happens to be something that happens. But the buzz comes around those odd, quirky moments. Right? I got a business card. It's around, I got a funny picture on it.

I've got the barrels out. I've got a sign in front of my store and I changed the letters every day. Uh, and we go that way. Uh, other buzz, a lot of companies , uh, you know, we'll go on YouTube and not just like do an ad. They'll do a funny one and a half minute are not funny. Even serious. A little education piece. You look at like dollar shave club, right? Well that's a big company now, but they started on YouTube period.

They just did informational videos and at the end said send us a check for 15 bucks and for a dollar a month you'll be in our club. So there's a lot of ways, and I think you're exactly right, it's creating some mystique or interest , uh, around the company that's a lot different. And again, the orientations towards that kind of marketing, what

Everyone who goes in a restaurant, they look at the menu, they order and they're gone. Uh, so you take a tactic like printing your menu will , what's going to be different about the experience at your restaurant than anyone else. And this is kind of in this world of what's my value, right? What's my difference in my brand? Uh, it could be something as small as two things. You have a master menu template , uh , you print them on hardbound and you don't get them laminated all the time. Why?

Because you want to be able to change it. So you could put your menu , um, and you could have , uh , keeps saying joke, but let's say again, joke of the week or let's say something informational, right? You go to , uh , a lot of restaurants and you'll see little cards that just give you a fact of the day kind of thing. Or you extend that to customization. That's a great tactic. You want to learn in a massive client.

You take your template and you make the menu, but you put their logo at the top and the name of their company, it costs nothing almost. Okay. So we talked about getting some different tactics going. Where do you go for when you're on a shoestring budget? Yeah, that's a great question because everybody's in that boat where they have to find a local printing shop or they have to find a local marketing agency, somebody to put things together for them . But you can get a lot done. I'm on the cheap.

If you spend a little time, I'll give you a couple of examples. One would be it's called usability hub.com. And you can come back and re listen to that to write it down. I'm a big advocate of them. Uh, you join it and if you're trying to test ideas, right? Uh, Oh, I wanna use this artwork. Is it better than this one? Um , I'm using this slogan, but I could also use this one. I don't know which one's best. Um, here's a design I've got on paper for some new product versus another design.

You go to usability hub.com and, and for cheap for cheap, you go on and you submit your designs and they'll charge your based on how many people you want to answer the questions that you have. Uh , but it's very economical, very economical and around the world. People have signed up to look at those ideas and vote and it's meant to be very rapid. You get the answer back in four to 10 hours. So if some, if you post up to ideas like, Oh, what, what slogan would you like?

Or which one of these pictures would you click on? Or which one of these design ideas do you want? Everybody that is signed up to this thing gets an email and they go online and the test expires in like 10 or 20 minutes and they answer it and they, if you ask questions like, why did you pick this one? They give you some answers and then bam, it goes within four hours. You've got to report back 150 people aged 40 55 because you selected it, right?

Answered your survey and here's all their answers and here's the winner and it gives you back the pictures and a bar chart and tells you which was the best. That's insane to do that in corporate marketing. You spend a fortune on usability hub, you're going to spend on our $100 and maybe even under 50 to go get that done. It's a phenomenal way for small businesses to go test out all of those kinds of things I said. So I'm a big, big advocate.

Another get it done , uh, that I love is called fiverr.com and it's tricky cause it's Fiverr FIV E R R looks like fiver but it's actually fiber.com . It is a crowdsourced worldwide database of people who create for businesses and for individuals, songs, artwork, logos, treatments. Uh, create a bar chart out of an Excel file. Almost anything you can think of you want to get done.

You can get on fiverr.com and the, the basics are, you type in, I want a logo and 200 people that do logos and they're all rated and you pick the five star one. You say, Hey , uh, I need a logo and I've got an idea. It might be this. And for five bucks they were under the idea and they send it back to you . You download it and put it in your credit card and you get five bucks, you have full permission, total copyright ownership. Uh, it's phenomenal.

And if you want to get fancy and get a couple or one color, will you do three? It might cost you 30 bucks, but it's phenomenal. So I've gotten tons of, I created a logo for a whole business campaign on fiber.com for five bucks. It was called 2020 vision. It was a strategic thing I did. And sure enough they came back with 2020 is like eyeglasses and little eyes . It was fantastic. Five bucks. I got that for , I highly, highly encourage people to go look at fiber.

I think that's a great site for people along with usability.

or [inaudible] .

So I say kind of break it down to really sort of three areas, right? The uh , uh, uh, I'll call it the brand, the value proposition, the fancy words, but just like, what is my difference in the world? The second would be customer service. I can talk a lot about that. It means everything in the world. And, and that third piece is what we've been talking about up so far, which is kind of the gorilla marketing.

How do you get tactics of how you differentiate, not do on a shoestring and do it on a shoestring budget. So that's what I say, worry about the value of the brand, the customer service and, and some outlets to get things done. Um , uh, effectively for the lowest cost.

And it's like, how do you get them to open it because it's a very cost effective way of marketing is direct direct mail or Doric marketing. Um , so what we did is we , uh, we, we sprang extra and we put the information, it was kind of targeted, right? This the only a few a hundred people we wanted to talk to, but we put it inside of a little box. It was shaped like a two , uh, around tube and it gets in everybody's box.

And I'm telling you , nobody's not gonna open a tube that's in their mailbox, a little cap on the Anika , what is in here, right? It's like a guaranteed open. And that's that piece about how do you do it a little different than everybody else. So we had a ball with that. Um, but I'll comment more on your, your, your piece of direct marketing. You know, you can override and kill yourself. Oh, the, you know, letters are dead . Direct mail is dead. Nobody ever does that.

Email is that , it's a, those are all direct marketing. Um, and that's not true. You really have to look at the demographic, right? So I'm going to tell you that a baby boomer is very, very, very , uh, likely to open a Val pack. I'm not shilling for ValPack , but I'm just saying because it's got a reputation. There's going to be 30 of those slick pieces of advertising in there and they're going to have discounts and introduce you to local businesses.

And a lot of older Americans, right in that boomer profile, they're very used to that. And ValPak's a fabulous way. A second one that works a lot for some businesses is a utility bill inserts, right? You're , you're doing an air conditioning campaign, you're an HVHC shop and you work with the local , uh , power company and you put an insert in the bill. Well, it costs you, but I'm talking now. It's the effectively . So you have to look almost by the tactic. They are not dead at all.

You just have to stylize them the right way. Whereas maybe for gen Z or a boomer, you're much better to be thinking about Pinterest or Instagram or , uh, you know, Etsy. All these outlets that are very current today. So do your research on demographic, right? Effective tactics for direct marketing for 25 year olds or 40 year olds or name the generation, boomer, gen Z, gen X, et cetera .

I can't go into a physical building and buy the things I used to do, but I am, you know, I'm guilty of the pleasure of also sitting in my pajamas and just , uh , ordering all my Christmas presents in front of a computer screen. So, so you think there is hope out there?

The motto is this, the best thing about this, the motto is meet your customers where they want to buy, not where you want to sell them. So the very, very key portion of this is know your customer, meet them where they want to buy. So a lot of people want to buy an Amazon. It's just how it is. I buy jeans or I buy auto parts of I musical instruments and you know, on and on, it's amazing. But where are all the places your customers want to buy?

And that leads me a bit to the brand and the value in that kind of thing in the customer service, which is ask your customers questions as often as you can without being obtrusive, especially when they're in your place of business. And the most, the best question, if you ask me in five minutes

Oh, you had five stars and 235 reviews on Google or Yelp. Okay, now we know what we're talking about, right? So it puts you in that zone. This is what I have to do. So that tells you, make sure that you ask customers for recommendations and reviews, meeting the customer where they want to buy. Give them a chance to review. Trust me in corporate worldwide businesses, this is a huge thing around loyalty. Make sure they have the opportunity to do that.

Ask for the reviews, ask for the recommendations. But the most important piece, where'd you find us? How'd you find about us? And one more question underneath that. Right. And train your employees cause it's not you as the owner, right? It's the employees that drive that experience. They all have to be trained to do that. A lot of valuable information, a lot of valuable information. Can I get one more thing? What was on my mind? Uh , it drives me cause we're talking about employees.

Uh, you know, every small business owner understands customer service, right? Services, cane , the customer is King. It's that interface. There has been a lot of work done in the last year and it doesn't matter what size companies is for because it's, it's very truthful. Um, that loyalty, which is really, you know, get the customer fine, but you need that repeat customer and you can see tons of podcasts. You need them back seven times, three times, et cetera, and a lot of tricks to go do that.

Um, but a big part of that loyalty is driven by customer experience. And the new research, oddly enough, is not focused on everybody said hi and we're being delightful and sunny attitude and that the biggest driver of disloyalty, disloyalty is the inability for you to respond when there's a problem. So what the services found, the survey and the work and the studies have found is the ability for a customer to resolve a problem with you when it feels like you're on their side.

It drives intense loyalty. I just had one, it got some business cards printed , uh, and I got them and I did it online. It was like this didn't look anything like online. I thought, Oh, I'm going to get hung out and killed because I checked the box that said, yeah, I swear this is it. Because they spent the money in Burnham and I wrote him just email, which another thing, meet me where I want to buy. I like chat, but they didn't have chat. But okay.

I send them an email and I got this great email back. Said , look, we'll give

You can ask for a mentor and a mentor in your business or around your question or your problem. Um, so for example , um, you would go to your profile, just scroll down a little bit and there's a section on careers and you click on that and it lets you type out a , a search. Jeez , I'm looking for a mentor like this. Other people on LinkedIn in their profiles have a place to say, I'm willing to accept questions for mentors. You send it out and you get a bunch of people respond, you pick one.

Sometimes they'll do emails , sometimes they'll take a half hour call with you and give you advice that that's great for small business. It'd be from financial, we're talking marketing. I know, but that could be cashflow issues. You're having her rent versus buy, you know, buy versus make. So it was a really, really good way to go get free advice.

And you are in kind of a great days while you're going through all the arts and crafts meandering through the park. So , um, join us again and today. Dot, dot, dot. Smile at a stranger.