Give your lizard marketing brain a boost
Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 10:11PM While waiting for a colleague to join me for lunch the other day at a nice Italian restaurant, I chatted with the proprietor about how his business had fared during the recession.
“Imagine that your salary was cut in half,” he lamented. “We used to have lines out the door at lunch time. Now we have empty tables. Business is bad.”
This being the San Francisco Bay Area, hotbed of technology and home to arguably the top three social media sites for small business owners (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter), I asked him what any self-respecting marketer would ask a restaurateur whose business is down 50%: “Have you considered tweeting about your daily lunch specials to people who work and live nearby?”
His response nearly blasted the glass out of the windows, while a few heads turned to see what the commotion was about.
“I hate all that technology stuff,” he barked at me. “We change our menu every day. If people want to know what’s on it, they can go to our Website.”
Before you rush to judgment that this restaurant owner needs to see a shrink (he’s most likely letting fears about technology rule how not to be more visible to a crowd that would welcome hearing from him) — consider that there’s a little bit of him in most of us, even though we hate to admit it.
Overnight, it seems, our marketing efforts revolve around technology. The fundamentals haven’t changed – we need to demonstrate our value and how we make people’s lives better as much if not more than before.
But whereas in the past we talked to people on the phone, sent flyers and brochures in the mail, wrote personal letters on letterhead (which we signed with blue ink), got mentioned in the newspapers and gave presentations to groups hungry for our message, today we can do all this without getting out of our chairs. We’re in control: we can push our message out through podcasts, blogs, vlogs, video, tweets, discussion groups, online networks, Website, ezines, teleseminars, Webinars – the list is endless, mindboggling and growing.
To prevent your brain from spinning out of control from the sheer weight of possibilities, I suggest breaking it all down into just two marketing categories: those activities that’ll bring you visibility over the long term, and activities designed to bring in business fast. One activity from each category is all you need to get seriously in the game.
Using this simple rule, the restaurant owner could start with an ezine for long-term visibility, and send out daily mid-morning tweets to bring the crowds lining up for his sumptuous lunch dishes.
What will your two activities be?
Roberta Guise works with experts, small business owners and professionals who want to be extraordinarily visible and sharpen their marketing edge. A small business marketing consultant and speaker, she is the founder of San Francisco-based Guise Marketing & PR. If you'd like to know how to apply these concepts to your situation, call for a free 1/2 hour consultation. 415-979-0611. www.guisemarketing.com
Reader Comments (2)
I can sympathize with the restaurant owner. Every time you turn around there is a new-new-thing touted as the best way to market your business, a new must-do strategy for networking, and some days it is a bit tiresome.
Somehow I managed to leave my cell phone on my desk last Friday, and after I got over the initial irritation of not being able to text, email, or make phone calls from any location I chose, I found it was quite enjoyable not to be tethered to my technology lifeline. Blogging, tweeting, posting on LinkedIn and Facebook, and all the other social-media options out there sometimes feel as though they eat up 1/2 the day, which is great if you are an information junkie with lots of time on your hands, but not so great if your job requires you to sit and do one particular thing for an extended period of time (e.g., like attend a hearing all day long).
Robert,
I agree that all the new-new-things can be overwhelming. Social media can drain those of us who are "solopreneurs," if we're not careful with our time. The restaurant owner, however, dismissed all technology, and wasn't interested in hearing about how one particular technique -- tweeting menu items or specials -- has proved to be a money-maker for restaurants. As small business owners we owe it to ourselves, employees, and customers to make our businesses as easy as possible to buy from. To do that we need to keep an open mind to ideas that in the short-term might be uncomfortable, but in the long run make our businesses attractive and appealing.