Archive for the 'Small business' Category

Its B2B : Back to blogging

Published on November 11, 2008 in Small business and blogging. 2 Comments

I’ve not been blogging recently and I’ve missed it.  Combination of the day job, some holidays, a nasty cold and (coming clean) general laziness has got in the way.  Not good I know, particularly as this literary drought coincided with my giving a presentation on the importance of business blogging to the Small Business 2.0 conference in London last month.  That presentation seemed to go down well and you can judge for yourselves by listening to it.

A quick comment on the Small Business 2.0 event: I enjoyed it very much and hats off to Dan and the Conference People team for putting it together.  It was a very telling sign of the times that the audience was not a bunch of “2.0″ nerds, but small businesses either looking at how to branch out from established marketplaces and become really multi-channel, or wanting to get more from the Internet than their traditional web site has given them to date.  There is a clear convergence of interest from SMEs with very different online backgrounds looking into how the Web can become a more effective part of their marketing and sales strategy.  I sincerely hope there will be more Small Business 2.0 events because the need is evident.  

And on that note, I will no longer feel like a miserable sinner and am getting back into the blogging saddle again … yeehaa! :-)

Just because ICANN doesn’t mean we should …

Published on July 1, 2008 in Online commerce, Online marketing, Small business and Social networks. 2 Comments

ICANN’s liberalisation of the top-level domains market has certainly caused a splash. We’re back to talking about gold rushes and cybersquatting all over again. How it’s going to pan out in terms of brand management and the impact on search engine optimisation is uncertain. The costs are equally unknown, although expected to in the telephone number range for the ‘best’ TLDs.

Agencies, hosting companies, and domain registrars will all be rubbing their hands together at the opportunity to breathe new life into their business models. But I can’t quite help feeling that the whole shebang seems just a little passé …

On the Web the first time round, we all rushed onto the beach flinging our towels down and claiming our individual space. After a while we caught on that actually everyone was having fun at the bar, so we left our umbrellas where they were and joined the party. That’s Web 2.0.

Social networking is largely domainless (who cares or knows what my Facebook URL is!). What matters are the interactions on the platform and between platforms through data porting. So my Tweet is syndicated to my Friendfeed and then displayed on my Facebook profile. The ‘address’ of this information is actually irrelevant. The important bit is the community with which I am sharing my content and time.

The social Web is changing the landscape of ecommerce too. Some recent research from Quidco found that 62% of shoppers consult online communities before making a purchase. And that only 27% of consumers go directly to the retailer. And the top three reasons …

1. communities offer me unbiased facts about products and services (32%);

2. I trust the views of communities more than merchants (27%);

3. communities help me find the best deal available (27%).

Given the above, is spending a fortune to ‘protect the brand’ with a custom domain (and then spending even more to drive traffic to it) a worthwhile activity? Or should businesses take part in the communities where customers are already talking about their brand, engage them and turn them into advocates? In other words, will a hotel chain get more customer value out of a .hotel TLD, or a series of positive reviews on Tripadvisor? I strongly suspect the latter.

This is really a big business dilemma as SMEs won’t typically have the marketing budgets to worry about securing a new TLD. That could turn out to be an advantage, as whilst the big brands buy better picks and shovels to take part in the new gold rush, small business can be down at the saloon mixing it up with their customers and doing real business.

Blogs … a low cost, high return marketing tool for small business

Published on January 1, 2008 in Online marketing, Small business and blogging. 3 Comments

So says the New York Times and it’s no surprise that I agree with them!

The article gives a good overview of how a blog can help a small business to market itself and build its brand and has some very nice supporting case studies. But the NYT does suggest that not all companies will be suited to using blogs as a marketing tool for a bunch of reasons, including that they may not have “enough to say”.

I don’t think the latter’s really the issue. Rather blogging (just like podcasting or using video) is a very new marketing tool for small businesses and the rule book hasn’t yet been written. As I’ve seen at BT Tradespace, SMEs are already using blogs in a variety of ways from a direct sales pitch, to source of advice, to general discussion. The level of experimentation is very high.

What is likely to happen is that in the hands of many thousands of small businesses, (the majority of whom will be coming to the medium for the first time), blogging itself is going to change. In fact many of the discussions about what is an appropriate use of blogging for marketing purposes may soon seem quite quaint as SMEs claim the medium for themselves.

As William Gibson said “the future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed”. My prediction for 2008 is that the use of blogging and other forms of social media as marketing tools will go well beyond the current niches and become mass market and that as a result we will see a new type and style of online marketing emerge with SMEs in the driving seat.

Will Myspace put online advertising into the reach of SMEs?

Published on December 11, 2007 in Online marketing, Small business and Social networks. 0 Comments

Myspace announced in November its plans to launch a new advertising platform, Selfserve, targeted at small businesses in early 2008. This seems like quite an important development and worthy of comment because:

1. It’s an ad platform for SMEs - now there’s quite some debate about whether Myspace is the right context for small business, and for many it undoubtedly isn’t. But the fact that Myspace has invested in Selfserve suggests that it believes it has the base already to make it a success.

2. Selfserve is about making online advertising accessible to SMEs -That means cheap (apparently pricing starts at $10) and easy - the ad platform has been designed for small businesses to set up and run their own campaigns. If Myspace achieves the latter it will have made a breakthrough as, despite Google’s efforts to date, online advertising is too damn complex for SMEs to master. Myspace acknowledged this in its release when it says that of over 23 million SMEs in the US less than 1 million advertise online.

3. Selfserve is about driving traffic to a Myspace profile - usage stays within the community and is not taken off site. This is quite a revolutionary change from traditional net marketing that is all about driving traffic to a web site. In Myspace’s model, not only is the SME spending their ad money in the network, they also have to invest time keeping their profile engaging and up to date in order to convert leads. A Selfserve advertiser will therefore be a very active Myspacer.

I’m going to be following Selfserve with interest as it’s a clear sign that Net marketing is going to be increasingly about managing a constellation of online assets in relevant communities, than sucking traffic into a stand-alone web site. It’s also an indication that engagement and quality of participation in a community will be at least as important as ad spend in driving campaign success.

Small business gets Web 2.0 … because it has to

Published on December 4, 2007 in Online marketing and Small business. 2 Comments

The presentation I gave to the Revolution conference got reported in Brand Republic. I’m very glad to see they thought it news worthy enough to comment on, less happy that they seemed to have missed the point. The article picks up on some research carried out by BT Business in June on SME Internet usage that found that only 8% of small businesses have a ‘fully comprehensive online marketing strategy’ - true enough - but the article then suggests that this is despite Web 2.0 tools being more suited to SMEs than larger enterprise. And this is where the article loses the plot.

Small businesses are starting to adopt web 2.0 tools to market themselves online precisely because traditional net marketing built on the ‘big iron’ of integrated campaigns using paid search and display ads and supported by a comprehensive SEO strategy is beyond the skill sets and resources (time and money) of most SMEs.

SMEs are struggling with online marketing and sales today and this is shown in the numbers. >40% don’t have web sites, <20% sell online and the percentage that make any significant sales online is much less than this. Running a web site is a costly, complex business that often requires the support of third parties to build, maintain and market.

Now look at the tools of web 2.0 - blogging, podcasting, photo and video sharing - adopted by millions of consumers because they are simple and powerful communication tools. These characteristics make them ideal for small businesses to build their net marketing strategy on.

SMEs have a direct connection with their customers in a way that larger enterprises struggle to mimic. That same piece of research from BT Business also found that 52% of small businesses get up to half of their revenue is from referrals, with 31% obtaining 75% of their work from word of mouth.

Now, if we put the costs and complexity of traditional online marketing alongside the growing importance of the Internet as a research and purchasing medium for consumers, it is apparent that SMEs desperately need to find a better way to market themselves online. This is provided through the tools of social media that are very well suited to the personal and conversational marketing style of small businesses that already works to their benefit offline.

I really believe SMEs have the need and incentive to drive innovation in online marketing using web 2.0 - much more so than big companies. We are starting to see this happen already with businesses as diverse as florists and PR experimenting with new forms of conversational marketing. And there’s much more to come.

Galileo was right

Published on November 29, 2007 in Online marketing and Small business. 3 Comments

Yesterday I gave a presentation on conversational marketing for small businesses at the Haymarket conference on Loyal Brand Advocates. I’m going to be developing a number of the themes I touched on in this blog. And the one I’m going to start with is this …

Galileo was right … our view of our place in the universe is no longer geocentric, in fact we understand that our planet is part of a solar system. Blindingly obvious today, revolutionary back in the 17th century.

We are starting to witness a Galilean revolution in online marketing. Our perspective on Internet marketing is still site-centric. We believe our web site should be the centre of our net marketing strategy. However, given the sheer number of sites and the very high costs of driving traffic to a single entity on the web, this strategy is not working for many businesses, especially SMEs, many of whom are not even trying.

I believe that we will soon see that marketing efforts (SEO, SEM, display …) that aim to make the Internet revolve around your web site are as absurd as thinking that the sun revolves around the earth. So what has changed?

The explosive growth in online communities has started to reveal on the net the social graph and relationships between people on a massive scale. To attract customers it is now necessary to participate in communities relevant to your business. By participation that means taking part in a conversation with prospects on terms understood and accepted by the community. We are very far from ‘traditional’ online marketing here.

Audiences are fragmented and this means customers are distributed and harder to reach. Online this means they are present in many different contexts, often behaving differently in each. So not only is it now necessary to be present in may different communities, we also have to adapt our behaviour and engagement accordingly to be relevant. This poses a stiff challenge to the concept of a strong unified brand.

So net marketing is going to move from being web site-centric to generating customer engagement through multiple, highly contextual ‘profiles’ - in other words a constellation of online assets. Online marketing will also shift from being ‘advertising’ driven to ‘participation’ based.

Some big brands have already seen the way the wind is blowing and are being successful. Most haven’t. And I also am convinced that smaller businesses are best placed to leverage this revolution in online marketing … but more on that later.

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