Category: Giving Advice

What is important at the moment?

15/4/2020

This is an unusual time. The coronavirus has changed our personal lives, our work lives and the lives of almost everyone, around the world. March and April 2020 will be remembered for the next hundred years, if not longer.

What should you do right now to protect your business - My Own Marketing Coach

Businesses are in shock. While some are obviously suffering, others are near collapse under the weight of a huge upturn in sales.

What is your situation? Have you got a handle on where you are now and where the business will be in 3 and 6 months.

If you are still working and have money coming in now, should your strategy be to look ahead three/six/twelve months and work out what you need to do now to make sure you have work and money coming in then?

If you are in one of the industries that are thriving right now (or perhaps better put as getting lots of sales right now), is it inventory you need to focus on and for marketing, what do you need to think about to make sure you keep getting sales longer term?

If your sales have dried up or you hadn't had time to build them up before the world locked down, do you need to focus your efforts on protecting the brand awareness you had and building it up so potential customers know that you exist?

Every business needs its own survival strategy right now. What's yours?

It is tempting to retreat at the moment, especially if you are at home, rather than in the office and if you have children at home, it is especially easy to deal with today's tasks and not think ahead.

We aren't sure what 'ahead' with look like, are we?

Although nothing is certain now, nothing is ever certain. What we do know is that 'out of sight, out of mind' is fairly true now and under more normal conditions,

Do you want your potential customers to remember you when they need/want you?

Small businesses start with zero brand awareness. No-one outside your immediately family has any idea who you are or what you do. You may be at the bottom but the only way it up, right :) What we do is start to tell our own network what we do and then spread it outwards from there.

Usually, as long as you keep up the effort, the awareness of your business - your brand - will grow.

Do this now. If you have been in business for years or just for weeks, treat your brand as an unknown fledgling and help it grow.

"Brands that continue marketing efforts throughout a recession also do better in the recovery." Perform, 2020

What to do:

1. Pick a couple of tactics (not too many because you need to keep them up and use them over and over again).

2. Choose some key messages that are not irrelevant now (between five and ten work)

3. Use a couple of channels - email definitely and then perhaps one or two social media channels - and repeatedly send out your messages. Over and over again.

4. Send out the messages again. Seriously. If you haven't told people the same thing twenty times (that is each key message 20 times...) over the next 3-4 months, tell them it again until you have.

But I haven't got time for that!

Do what you can. Every little helps (to steal Tesco's motto).

But my audience will get fed up if I do that!

Only if they see it twenty times. Which they won't. If you send the exact same email out, some will get annoyed, so rewrite it.

You've seen your social media post reach rate, right? (If you don't know what we are talking about, please get in touch with us here.) If you have 200 followers, each individual post might reach 40 people. Of those 40 people, 20 scrolled past without noticing it. 20 will have noticed it but 19 will have forgotten it 5 seconds later.

Sorry to be so blunt but if you want people to get your message, you have to show it to them over and over and over again.

They aren't looking for it.

Our marketing agency, Write in Danderyd, builds and runs all sorts of marketing tactics for the smallest of businesses across the world.

Check out their latest post about ensuring your clients and potential clients don't forget you right now:

What to do for your business now

GDPR - you don't always need consent to email your mailing list

17/5/2018

By now, you probably have received a few or a few too many emails asking you to confirm that you still like to hear from this or that company.

On 25th May 2018, a new EU directive, called GDPR, comes into place that more heavily regulates how we as businesses store information about people. For Swedish businesses, it isn't much more stringent than the current data protection legislation BUT it comes with heavy fines as penalties.

The directive is long and extremely hard to read (we had to read it....zzzzzz....) to to try to help you all so you don't need 400+ pages of legalese bedtime reading, here is a small snippet of it in as easy language as we could manage, that outlines the specific reasons you can store information about someone and contact them.

The directive provides six reasons that you need to choose from if you want to store someone's personal information (and if their email address has their name in it, that counts):

(a) the person has specifically given consent to the processing of their personal data for one or more specific purposes;
(b) you need to keep their details and contact them in relation to work you are doing for or in relation to them or in order to do something that they have asked for before entering into a contract;
(c) you need to keep their details because the law says you must;
(d) you need to keep their details in order to protect their or someone else's vital interests;
(e) you need to keep their details so you can carry out a task in the public interest or for official authority;
(f) you need to keep their details for the purposes of the legitimate interests by you or by a third party, except where they are overridden by the fundamental rights and freedoms of the person which require protection of personal data, in particular where the person is a child.

Many companies are focusing on getting the consent of their contacts to continue sending them marketing emails, for example. However, the GDPR clearly states that direct marketing is an allowable 'legitimate interest' for choosing reason (f) above and therefore you don't actually need a person's explicit consent to email them something salesy. You do, however, need to make it very easy for them to ask you to stop emailing them and, if they do, stop immediately. You also must delete old contact information - if you aren't actively marketing to a contact and can't show any other reason from the list above that you should keep their details, get rid of them

What does your contacts list look like? Do you use a CRM system? If a contact asked you to provide all the information they can soon ask for to show how you are handling their information, could you?

If you need help with any GDPR issues or have questions, get in touch with us at My Own Marketing Coach here and/or contact Shadi Amundin, Special Counsel at Cederwalls International Law Firm on Shadi (AT) cederwalls.com or +46 (0)707 75 63 55.

Does Instagram give you new clients? Maybe it should...

19/1/2018

For those of you who use Instagram for your businesses, do you feel your effort is delivering potential new clients to you or is nothing much happening?

It is absolutely possible to use Instagram to build sales but you must spend your energy on the right things. You might think that is posting great photos every day but, for most businesses, that isn't what you should be doing.

We've just written a free checklist of all the elements you need to work through to get Instagram bringing customers/clients to you, including:

- what to set up and what to ignore
- what to post
- what more to do after you have posted
- what it takes to grow your sales

Click here to get it (it is a PDF):
www.myownmarketingcoach.com/instagramchecklist.html

How to use Instagram for business - a MOMC guide

Use forums and answer sites to answer questions

13/3/2017

Monday morning marketing idea

Give help where people ask for it but make sure you are talking on places that your potential clients are operating on. If you are a local business, stick very definitely to local sites.