I’m mostly bothered by the warlike analogies directed at customers, as if we are trying to fight, capture, abduct or otherwise force people to buy from us. As part of the marketing lexicon we have:

• Email blasts – Hit prospects with enough firepower, and surely we’ll get a few casualties, uh I mean customers.
• Targeting customers – Hit the bullseye, win a customer. Just hope he survives the blood loss.
• Capturing eyeballs – Possibly the creepiest analogy. For me, it conjures up images of a mad scientist’s laboratory.
• Launching campaigns - This analogy is the most pervasive in marketing-speak, but it comes from military campaigns. Don’t attack until you see the whites of their eyes (see above).
• Captive audiences – Once we’ve got them where we want them, they’ll have no chance but to pay attention! I believe this is the rationale for advertising placed above urinals.
• Guerilla marketing – In case you thought marketing warfare was only for big companies. Now small businesses can get in on the assault. You may not be able to buy enough ad space to “cut through the clutter,” but you can certainly launch surprise attacks.

All this talk of conquering makes marketers lose sight of their customers’ humanity. After all, we are marketing to actual people. And actual people aren’t coerced into their purchasing decisions and won’t be swayed by “blasts” of advertising copy. They will just ignore you.

For marketing to be effective, it has to honor the true relationship between business and customer. Marketing parlance describes an outdated model of marketing when companies felt like they were in control. That illusion has been shattered. Now customers have many options, research tools and alternatives available to them. In reality, the customers call the shots, and they are in control.

But we need metaphors and analogies. It makes marketing efforts easier to visualize and share. These descriptions need to be accurate and enforce how people actually buy. A bad analogy is like a calloused rhinocerous (and the same can be said for bad similes, eh?). Let’s try to use realistic metaphors, ones that actually depict the relationship between business and customer. Some are already in circulation, such as the following:

• Brand story – Instead of campaigns, develop a shared story between you and your customers. Think of advertising, PR and other communication methods as ways to move the story along.
• Relationship marketing – Brand stories build relationships. With war marketing, you capture dollars. With relationship marketing, you develop a relationship that leads to sustainable business.
• Seek permission – Get customers’ permission before starting up a conversation with them. Don’t waste time communicating with people who will never be your customer.
• Engage customers – It’s your responsibility to find out what interests customers and engage them.
• Build community - Engaged customers who are in a relationship with you will be eager to share that sense of community with others. A loyal community is the perfect referral network.
• Email broadcast – No need to blast customers. Once you’ve sought permission, update them with content you wouldn’t mind getting in your own inbox.

Interestingly, some of these terms don’t have to be metaphors. We can have real relationships with our customers. Do you have more metaphors for my list? Email me at amanda@zooinajungle.com.

Let’s look at some success stories (it’s too easy to find failures). Here are four companies successfully putting these attitudes into practice.

Old Spice

Old Spice took their “Smell Like a Man, Man” story from a few clever commercials to an Internet phenomenon. They interacted with followers on Twitter, responding to questions with YouTube videos by the Old Spice Man himself. Hilarious? Certainly. And the business results were nothing to scoff at: the Old Spice line of products has skyrocketed in sales, rising by 107% in June.

But why did it work? Companies create funny ads all the time without such dramatic results. The key to this effort was acknowleding the power of the customer. Old Spice made their spokesman into a celebrity then shared him with the world. They encouraged their customers to be part of the joke.

Etsy – Buy and Sell Handmade

Etsy’s Facebook marketing is tailored for those who wish to buy or sell handmade and vintgage objects. They adopt a breezy, conversational style while recommending their sellers’ products. Here’s an example, where 57 people enjoyed reading about bird scupltures:

Author Guy Kawasaki

Apple veteran Guy Kawasaki’s Twitter strategy is unique and encourages curiosity. Imagine my surprise when I saw Guy Kawasaki was following people I know. It was flattering, but I found upon investigation that he is following 286,644 people. It’s very egalitarian of him to eschew the general rule that you shouldn’t follow more people than follow you. And, for me, seeing he follows people I know created a greater interest to learn more about him and his company. Like, did you know you can hire Guy for speaking engagements?

Wal-Mart (yes Wal-Mart!)

The retailing supergiant has avoided brute force marketing lately. Their Save Money, Live Better brand story tries to connect with customers, and they are building a community of “Savers.” Here is an excerpt from their website that shows their implementation:

The story extends to public relations as well- recently Wal-Mart donated 6,000 articles of professional clothing to Dress for Success, a group that helps unemployed women get ready for the workplace. Finding a job seems like a great way to Save Money, Live Better.

Small businesses are especially poised to take advantage of this empowering, personalized kind of marketing. Who could possibly be better at creating stories and growing relationships with their customers? How can you start putting these concepts to work for your business today?

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In this podcast, I offer several tips for small businesses looking to improve their implementation skills. Listen or download below:

Download the small business marketing implementation MP3 file here. (4.7MB)

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Being naturally optimistic, I always try to turn bad situations into new opportunities. Our still-faltering economy may be dragging down business, but there are ways for small businesses to take advantage of the economic downturn. Here are a few:

• Landlords may be willing to make deal and offer short-term leases. The Wall Street Journal reports that a new trend has started in retailing: the pop-up store. These stores operate with a short-term test lease to determine their feasibility. Creating low-risk leases enables more entrepreneurs the opportunity to start small-business retailing.
• Start a business, and start making money. With many businesses unwilling to hire new employees in this uncertain economy, “accidental entrepreneurs” are being born. A USA Today story shows that 25% of workers laid off in the last six months are considering starting a business instead of finding a new job. Businesses still need work done, so they are increasingly turning to outside resources (that has certainly been my experience).
• On the flip side of unemployment, if your business is looking to hire, you have great options right now. You need to maximize this opportunity. Make sure not to rush hiring decisions- conduct enough interviews to find the right person for the job who will fit with your culture.
• If you have the cash to ramp up your advertising, you can buy more for your buck. For example, one of my clients is in an industry where pay per click (PPC) advertising has completely dried up. Now we can advertise with little competition and a much smaller budget. There may be fewer customers than before, but we are reaching almost all of them.
• If this economy is leaving you with too much extra time, put it to good use. Take my small business marketing test to find your weak areas. When your business is booming, it’s hard to find time to plan for the future. If you work on your business strategy now, your business can come back stronger than it’s ever been.

Has your business developed any opportunities as a result of the recession? Please share!

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Yesterday, an acquaintance asked me for advice on his startup company’s marketing. He just didn’t know how to get started with his first customer. He wanted to know what kinds of brochures, business card or website he needed to get people interested.

I told him, “Decide who you want your customers to be.”

He replied, “Oh, you mean middle class or upper class?”

“No, I mean decide which specific people in which neighborhoods should be your customers. Get to know them, how they talk and what their needs are. Then you can start selling. Then you will know what should be on your website.”

When people first start looking for customers, their instinct is to look for large groups of people and hope to convince a few of those people to hire them. The idea is, “If I aim for all middle class families, surely I’ll get a couple of customers.” But this instinct is wrong. The more people with whom you try to communicate, the less each one will pay attention to you. For example, I imagine you rarely pay attention to the loudspeaker at the grocery store. It’s just not that meaningful to you because the grocery store is trying to communicate a general message to the entire store. When you try to be meaningful to everyone, you end up being meaningful to no one. Generalization for the masses is the worst way to sell a new (or any) product.

To find its first customer, a startup needs to get specific. Instead of selling to groups differentiated by demographics, sell to individual people. Talk their language and address their needs.

On a related note, marketing expert Steve Yastrow wrote two very helpful newsletters on how to differentiate your customers as individuals instead of groups– Do Differentiation Differently and How to Do Differentiation Differently. Steve’s essential message is:

“Your customer doesn’t really care if you are different. But he will be blown away if he sees that you think he is different.”

Showing your customer you think he is different is more work than blanketing a city with flyers- but it will also yield more results. As counterintuitive as it may seem, startups (and all companies) will find more customers if they focus on fewer people.

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The most difficult part of any plan is implementation. It’s not because the tasks of implementation are hard. Usually accomplishing these tasks don’t require great skill or superhuman brainpower. The difficulty arises because implementation requires dedication and tenacity. You have to keep at it. Every day.

For many small business entrepreneurs, this process is boring, and implementation is often cut short, displaced by more exciting strategizing and perceived opportunities. But a small business can never reach its potential without completing the initiatives it starts.

Here are some tips for implementation success:

• Pay attention to details. Read my recent blog post about a business had a failed advertising strategyby ignoring the details on the printed piece.
• Develop easy-to-understand success metrics. Know you’re succeeding (or failing) by establishing milestones along the way to your goal. These milestones should have due dates to create a sense of urgency.
• Hold quarterly or monthly check-up meetings. Grade your company’s success on a regular basis with progress reports on your milestones. Make these meetings short and to the point, or everyone will dread them (don’t you hate meetings that drag on and keep you from work?).
• Don’t be a roadblock. Often small business owners are the bottleneck in the company’s decision-making process. Decide which decisions you don’t need to make. It will free up your time and speed up your strategy’s success.
• Use your team’s strengths. If you find it difficult to stay on track, someone on your team likely has strong implementation skills. Give them authority to check in, set meetings and make sure progress is made.

Now use these tips to go forth and implement!

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In any marketing venture, disregarding details will often result in a marketing disaster. Advertising and direct mail are by their very nature public, so marketing mistakes in these areas are very visible. So learn from this company’s mistakes before you launch your next small business marketing initiative.

Furniture Row, a retailer with 330 stores in 31 states, apparently put a lot of thought (and resources) into developing a system for sending direct mail to people who recently moved into a new home. Here is a mailer recently sent to a resident in Cincinnati, OH:

It’s a shame they didn’t put as much thought into getting customers to their stores. The mailer doesn’t include a phone number or website address, just cryptic directions to go “N. of the Florence Mall” and an address in Denver. Observe:

Without any directions or way to contact the company, this direct mail piece is a failure. Surely Furniture Row doesn’t expect new homeowners to drive around Florence, KY looking for their store.

In your marketing efforts, pay attention to the details (unless you like wasting your marketing budget on mistakes).

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Soon our bathroom will look something like this.

Here’s an unusual example:

This week started out with a ruined bathroom. My husband and I own a beautiful, 100-year-old home in a historic neighborhood of Cincinnati, but the bathroom plumbing finally showed its age and crumbled. We’re taking this opportunity to completely remodel and enlarge the bathroom, which might take several weeks.

Problem: This bathroom contains the only shower in our house.

Solution: Join a local gym to take showers (and maybe get some exercise.)

When we walked into the gym in our street clothes, salespeople beset upon us. The first question our salesman asked was, “Are you interested in cardio or weights?” How could we respond that we were interested in neither? Weary and desperate for a shower, we just wanted to buy a membership. It’s the closest gym to us, so we weren’t going to comparison shop. The salesman proceeded to show us every piece of equipment and describe all the classes before we were finally able to give him a credit card.

With a few questions at the beginning of his sales pitch, he could have saved himself a lot of time and made money faster. Instead, he treated us like every other person walking into that gym- with a polite, very well-rehearsed sales pitch. I’m certain he treated us exactly how the gym trained him to sell to us, and he will probably be recognized for sales excellence at the next quarterly meeting. But following a script doesn’t best help the customer, especially when faced with unusual customers like my husband and me.

Is your small business set up like this gym, to put impediments in the way of customers buying? If you train your salespeople to sell without considering the customer’s situation, then you are. Salespeople shouldn’t know exactly what they are going to say before they encounter an actual customer – they might miss a customer who is ready to buy.

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Wrong. If your team feels empowered, they will think of ideas you never dreamed of.

Your small business will never grow unless you develop a team who share the same business vision and are empowered to make the vision a reality. I’ve seen many small businesses stagnate because their owners weren’t able to communicate, delegate and relinquish authority to their teams. Your team can consist of employees, independent contractors and vendors.

Micro-managing means managing the small stuff. As a small business owner, you should be concerned with things such as the company vision or strategies for the upcoming year. Here are some ways to avoid micro-managing. They may not seem like large infractions, but think of the time wasted that could be put towards valuable business growth activities.

• Always think, “Is this the most important thing I could be doing right now?” Management expert Peter Drucker wrote, “Doing the right things is more important than doing things right.”
• Unless you own a graphic design firm, don’t ever question a font again. Instead, employ designers who have the freedom to design what your customers want- not what you want.
• Don’t spend an hour on the phone with an accounting software vendor when you will never use the software. Let your bookkeeper make these decisions. The same rule applies to any kind of purchase.
• If your sales team has a bold new idea to reach customers, let them try it out on a limited scale. Avoid “talking it to death” at all costs.

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Google’s free keyword tool will end your SEO writer’s block. Although the tool is designed to provide keywords for you AdWords account, it can help you with so much more. Using the keyword tool, you can learn:

• The most popular terms people use to search for your products and services- both globally and locally.
• The most competitive terms- hence the most difficult to optimize for.
• What terms your website is currently optimized for- sometimes these results are surprising if you haven’t paid much attention to SEO.

Keyword Tool Examples

Let’s help About.com keep their search ranking but be a little less dreary to read. They could use any of the following terms as a replacement for tax accountant. Notice that “tax preparation” receives about five times the search volume as “tax accountant.”

Did you notice that the competition for all of the above keywords is extremely high? It would be difficult for any tax accountant’s website to break into the top page in these searches. Fortunately, there are some less competitive options that are more specific. A tax accountant firm could be successful at writing an article titled, “How to Find a Tax Accountant.” Or they could focus on geography, such as “tax accountant in ohio.”

If you are curious what Google thinks your website is optimized for (and you should be!), you’ll want to enter your website address into the keyword tool. Here are the results for my site, which specializes in small business marketing.

Google seems to understand what Zoo in a Jungle Marketing is optimized for pretty well. Tip: although “business” garners the most searches in a month, it would be foolish to optimize for such a general term. The likelihood that someone searching for “business” wants to read my blog or hire Zoo in a Jungle Marketing is very slim.

Go forth, and use Google’s free keyword tool to optimize!

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I often am asked, “What does Zoo in a Jungle Marketing mean?” While I certainly do like animals, there’s a deeper philosophy to the name. My company name is inspired by author Peter DeVries when he said, “Life is a zoo in a jungle.”

Life is a zoo in a jungle. This quote sums up two keys to small business success: personal responsibility and seizing opportunity. Everyone lives with constraints to their freedom, much like zoo animals live in cages. Some of these constraints are internal. We worry if we are capable, smart, creative or likeable. Others are external, like regulations, competitors or the weather. Often, these constraints keep us from fulfilling our greatest potential and highest ability.

Successful businesspeople take personal responsibility for the constraints that surround them – both internal and external constraints. Less successful people make excuses instead. You may say that it’s not your fault that the economy is bad, or that you would be successful if only circumstances were different. The fact remains that external constraints are facts you may not be able to change, but you will have to work with them. (People who make excuses for their own internal constraints should consider leaving the path of entrepreneurialism- it might be too dangerous for them.)

If you heed the internal constraints and ignore the impact of the external ones, you will remain in your cage, afraid to venture out into the unknown world. But it is in this jungle where opportunity resides. Once you take responsibility for your constraints, you can seize opportunity and uncage your potential.

To hear more, listen to the interview on my small business marketing philosophy below:

Download the small business marketing philosophy MP3 file here. (1.2MB)

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