With so many interest calculations, inflation rate, mortgage payments, and investments to take into account, planning a budget becomes a real brain teaser. Although this might still be an ongoing struggle for many people, at least iPhone users can now take a sigh of relief as iPhone now features some great applications that help you plan your budget easily. Given below are 5 budget planning apps that are now enjoyed by iPhone users:

1.     Money For iPhone

This budgeting app for iPhone is considered one of the best apps there in the market for your iPhone. It is feature-rich and comes with an extremely user-friendly interface for your convenience. This app holds its specialty in the fact that it is able to set different budgets for different categories. You can have different sets of budgets for your daily expenses, travelling expenses, household expenses and many more. What more, you can even track your budgets through the budget monitor. This is especially recommended for the control freak in you who wants to monitor every aspect of the budget and break it down to the finest details.

2.     iXpenselt

This extremely helpful budget-monitoring app does a lot more than just monitoring your budget and as a result is extremely popular among iPhone users. You can have a graphical view of your monthly budgets and expenses and compare your performance. You can also use this app for things like checking your account balance, transferring money between accounts and many more. A nifty feature of this app allows you to set up reminders for upcoming bill payment dates. Say goodbye to delinquent payments!

3.     Mint.com Personal Finance

Talk about a simple and effective app for monitoring your budget and Mint.com Personal Finance crops up in most iPhone user’s mind. The fact that this app shows all your estimated expenses and real expenses in one place makes it such an effective tool for monitoring your budget adherence performance. A feature of this app actually suggests a budget for you depending upon your income and spending habits. No more difficult job of preparing a budget! And the best part about this app is the fact that it is free!

4.     Balance

 Yet another free and extremely effective budget monitoring app for your iPhone is Balance. This app is best suited for monitoring the balance on your numerous credit and debit accounts allowing you to avoid the overdraft penalty in the future. What can be a better way of adhering to your budget than knowing how much you are allowed to spend?

5.     Pageonce

This app is more of a utility bill paying tool than a budget planner. By using this app on your iPhone you can not only receive and monitor the bills (check the due dates, the payable amounts, etc.) but also pay them. No more standing in queues or hunting for a computer. Pay your bills while fiddling with your favorite gadget. It doesn’t get simpler than this. This app comes free of cost for you!

Adherence to a detailed budget and timely payment of bills must be your two golden rules to avoid financial bankruptcy during these difficult economic times.

Brenda Lyttle is a finance expert and a contributor for the site, http://www.freecreditreportsinstantly.org/, where you can access your free credit reports and scores.

How Using Localeze Can Enhance Your Business’ Local Search Listings

One of the challenges businesses face today is ranking well on local keyword search listings. The best way to position your business in a search engine ranking page is by practicing a complete inbound marketing strategy.

However, there are other tips, tricks, and tools that can help you boost your overall rankings in local search. The primary challenge that local businesses face is they tend to get a decent ranking established on keywords that use the business location’s hometown, but many businesses often service a much larger area.

For instance, many of the small to mid-size businesses that we work with in the Cleveland area are located in one of the many suburbs of Cleveland, or have multiple locations throughout the Greater Cleveland area and even throughout Ohio.

The other challenges with local search directories such as Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Yellowpages.com, or MerchantCirlcle is that it’s difficult to set up and manage multiple directories (several hundreds) and keep your businesses listing information accurate and up-to-date.

This has caused an issue with many businesses listing on local search platforms, because information can quickly become outdated, inaccurate and misleading.

Localeze is a local search database aggregator, that allows businesses to easily control their online identities and local search listing information. Localeze then licenses the database to leading search platforms like Google, Yahoo, Bing (How Localeze Works).

Localeze is built on being able to monitor, manage and authenticate your businesses local search listings. David Hirschman of Street Fight Mag wrote an excellent post Localeze’s Dague: Solving the Problem of Search for Local Merchants, where he noted that in 2006 Localeze made the decision to allow businesses and authorized channel partners like our agency to manage local search databases in real-time, online.

This has enabled Localeze to become the central source for validating, managing, distributing, and consistently improving trusted business listings in local search.

Below is an infographic of how the Localeze search process works:

Here are 3 key benefits for using Localeze to manage your businesses online identity:

1. Easily manage and update your businesses online identity – Localeze enables businesses to do this in one easy-to-use location, that is sent to hundreds of local search platforms. Platforms include websites, mobile apps and navigation devices. These allow businesses to easily gain more visibility in local search across multiple channels.

2. Validated business identity search listing – Localeze continuously monitors and validates search listings to maintain their accuracy. Local search directories like Google, Yahoo, and Bing view these listing as more trustworthy than listings that are not part of the 14 million+ local businesses in the Localeze database. This establishes better local SERP results.

3. Easily list multiple office locations, and the areas that your business serves -  Enhanced listings allow your business to add custom keywords to listings, offer the ability to get found on the keywords most relevant to your business, rather than relying on preselected keyword options that most local search directories provide.

Localeze requires a yearly fee of around $300.00 to manage your local listings. As a business owner, you can manage your own listings with Localeze, or work with an authorized channel partner like our agency to help you set up and maintain listings. Localeze is a great option for businesses seeking to optimize local seo initiatives.

This mind blowing information shows how the virtual and online world is changing so rapidly. Did you know there are 31 billion searches on Google every single month? In 2006 it was only 2.7 billion. In 1992 the first commercial text message was sent. Today the number of messages sent and received every day exceeds the population of the planet…..
Courtesy of Mr Karl Fisch and Dr Scott Mcleod.

Contacts

Allocation of B2B marketing budgets

SUMMARY: Between website design, email campaigns, social media and more, it can be challenging to determine which marketing tactics will maximize your limited budget.

In this week’s chart, we review the 2011 B2B budget allocations of more than 900 marketers. How do you compare?Q. Approximately what percentage of your marketing budget is allocated to each of the following tactics – not including personnel?

Click here to see a larger, printable version of this chart

Website design requires the specialized skill set of an experienced Web designer and optimization expert. Such services can be costly to an organization.

This is reflected in the above chart, where website design, management and optimization represent a greater percentage of marketing budgets on average than any other tactic. Since this was also rated as the most effective tactic overall, it is apparent that organizations and prepared to invest in it.

A number of significant expenses are required when participating in trade shows, including travel, booth rental, marketing to drive booth traffic, etc., making this tactic a likely candidate to utilize a good portion of the marketing budgets of participating organizations.

Email marketing is commonly viewed as a cost effective marketing channel, however that should not imply that significant investments in this tactic are uncommon. Expenses in email marketing include list rental, email deployment programs, email deliverability services and list building initiatives, to name a few.

Now that you have an understanding of industry averages for the most effective B2B marketing tactics, and the average allocation of B2B marketing budgets, take a few minutes to evaluate your current situation.

How does your mix and budget allocation compare to industry averages? Are you happy with the revenue performance of all of your marketing channels? Which channels do you think you can improve? Which are you thinking about dropping, and which can you not live without?

For additional research data and insights about B2B marketing, download and read the free excerpt from the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Advanced Practices Handbook.

And be sure to subscribe to the complimentary Marketing Research Chart of the Week newsletter.

Useful links related to this chart

MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 – in Boston and San Francisco

Members Library — New Chart: Changes to the Marketing Budget Landscape in 2011

Members Library — New Chart: Chief requirements for B2B lead qualification

Author: Neal Schaffer

13 December 2010 / Blogging, Social Media Marketing 226 ReTweets

There are many “best of” blog posts that have been written about WordPress plugins, so I wanted to cover a different angle with this post.  I see WordPress and blogging like this:  If your company has a social media strategy, chances are you have a corporate blog.  Our friends at Hubspot released their analysis some time ago that blogging is good for SEO.  And if you are blogging, chances are you are using WordPress, which is the most popular blogging platform among the biggest blogs.  In this way, I see a natural relationship between blogging, WordPress, social media, and SEO.  The WordPress platform in itself, however, will not allow your blog to be found through social media or appear in search engines searches.  But because of its extensible architecture and the plethora of plugins that are readily available for it, there are many ways in which using these WordPress plugins can help enhance your website and allow your blog, your company, and yourself get found in social media and by search engines throughout 2011.

I looked at the best plugins which I either use for this site or have installed for my social media-optimized website development clients that 1) help make your WordPress-powered website more social media optimized and 2) are essential to ensure that your blog gets found online through enhancing the SEO of your website.  I believe the below list of 15 WordPress plugins will remain popular well into 2011:

Social Media WordPress Plugins for 2011

1. DiggDigg

DiggDigg has been one of the best kept secrets for awhile, but now that we’re heading into 2011 it’s time that you should know about it.  DiggDigg is an all-in-one plugin to handle all of your ReTweet, Facebook Share, etc. buttons which allows your visitors to easily share your content throughout social media.  Sure, there are other plugins which give you similar functionality, but I prefer DiggDigg because of its flexibility and rich functionality.  Here’s a summary of some of DiggDigg’s main features:

Not only can you display the normal ReTweet buttons right at the top of your content, DiggDigg also provides a floating widget of ReTweet buttons to the side of the content, just like you are seeing to the left of this text.  You’ve seen it on Mashable – now install it on your site!

The ability to choose which ReTweet button you want: Twitter, TweetMeme, or Topsy.  You’d be surprised by the different ReTweet numbers each one returns.

Display the new LinkedIn Share button as well as the StumbleUpon button.

Choose whichever URL shortener you want to use.

2. Disqus Comment System

There are a lot of different comment systems out there that take the place of the native WordPress one, but Disqus wins for both its functionality as well as its streamlined design.  It has full functionality which provides for threaded comments, white listing and black listing of commenters by username and/or IP address, and of course the ability to allow your users to post their comments to Facebook and Twitter in addition to your blog post.  Let your blog readers better comment and share their thoughts about your blog using Disqus.

3. Facebook Like Button

You’ll notice that, despite how much I rave about DiggDigg, I have another similar plugin on this list.  This is because the one thing that DiggDigg lacks is the ability to show the Facebook Like button displaying faces.  This is where this appropriately named Facebook Like Button plugin comes in.  Earlier this year I wrote a blog post about how to add a Facebook Like button to your WordPress blog or website.  Now that technology has caught up, you can simply use this plugin instead.

4. Feedblitz FeedSmart

RSS feeds are one way in which your blog readers consume your content, so you want to make sure that the ability to share you content in social media is displayed directly on the RSS page.  The native WordPress RSS feeds do not provide this functionality nor have the ability to provide email subscriptions, but Feedburner and Feedblitz are two 3rd party services that do.  I am someone who actually switched from Feedburner to Feedblitz some time ago.  It all started one day when my Feedburner RSS feeds were not displaying properly on this blog, just a few weeks before I was about to publish my LinkedIn book.  Unable to find or get help, I fortunately discovered Feedblitz, a company that offers highly customizable RSS feed management, with all of the additional social media-related functionality that you would expect, that also has additional email marketing capabilities built into it.  Most importantly, it offered responsive technical support that went out of their way to help me whenever I have run into any issues.  Yes, there is a nominal fee attached to it, but its value far exceeds its cost.  Once you have Feedblitz installed, this plugin will forward all of your RSS feeds to your Feedblitz account so you have an accurate count of how many RSS subscribers you have.  Not only does this provide you with a better metric to track, it’s also helpful in promoting how many RSS subscribers you have by displaying the Feedblitz-provided RSS subscriber chicklet on your website.

5. My Recent YouTube Widget

You already know why you should have a YouTube channel, so why aren’t you introducing it to your website visitors?  This handy little widget allows you to choose how many of your latest YouTube videos you want to display in your sidebar and footer.  Simple, customizable, and it works.  Help your website visitors easily discover content on your other social media properties.

6. PollDaddy Polls

Polls can provide important content to help engage with your followers and fans throughout social media.  They can also provide priceless feedback which can be invaluable to your company.  With PollDaddy polls, not only can you easily create a customized look-and-feel to your poll in minutes, this poll can now be embedded into a sidebar widget and/or a post.  Furthermore, PollDaddy automatically creates a shortened link for you to tweet about or even a Facebook link to allow your fans to join in the poll.

7. Social Media Widget

This handy little widget allows you to easily place social media icons on your sidebar which link to your social media properties by simply inputting the URLs of each of your profiles.  There are a host of websites that are supported, and there are even different icon types and sizes that you can choose from to advertise your social media presence.

SEO WordPress Plugins for 2011

8. All in One SEO Pack

This is the default plugin to manage many SEO aspects of your website.  Most importantly, it provides you a way to easily change the title and description of each blog post and page so that you can optimize them for SEO.  A necessity for every blog.

9. cbnet Ping Optimizer

It has been said that every time you update a previously published blog post, WordPress automatically informs the world by pinging them.  What if you end up revising your blogs on many occasions to provide further clarifications, update categories, add links, and perform SEO optimization?  That’s right, that same blog post will be pinging servers for each time you revise, and this could make you look like a ping spammer.  This cbnet Ping Optimizer ensures that for every published blog post, there is only one instance of a ping being transmitted.

10. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

Some suggest that it is good SEO practice to have an HTML internal sitemap created for your site above and beyond an XML one.  This plugin will automatically do that for you, and then all you need to do is enter one line of code and your HTML sitemap has been created.  You can see an example of this plugin’s output in the Windmill Networking sitemap.

11. Google XML Sitemaps

The most important sitemap for search engines to spider your site is your XML one.  This plugin easily and automatically creates an XML sitemap to allow search engines to find your site.  If you don’t have this plugin installed, your content might not be as easily found by search engines.

12. Scribe SEO ($)

I like to think of Scribe as my personal SEO assistant.  There are two sides to SEO: Offsite and onsite.  Scribe gives you all of the assistance you need with your onsite SEO by providing each page or post that you analyze with a score and then assisting you in reaching their recommendations for 100% SEO optimization.  I wouldn’t blog without it.  Note that Scribe SEO is the only WordPress plugin on this list that requires a paid subscription.

13. SEO Friendly Images

I’ll be honest with you in informing you that while this plugin looks like it provides killer functionality, it has never worked for me.  That doesn’t mean it may not work for you, hence my including it on this list.  When working, this plugin will automatically populate the Alt-Text of your images with relevant keywords, which will help your images be found on search engines and provide more visitors to your blog.  Sound too good to be true?  Give it a try and let me know if it works for you!

14. SEO Smart Links

There are certain keywords in your blog that you probably would like to link to the same post or page on whenever they appear to help with your website’s internal SEO.  Register the keywords and associated URLs with this plugin, and it will automatically insert them into your blog post for you.

15. Zemanta

If you’re not linking to the outside world in your blog posts, search engines may not consider your post a resourceful one.  That’s why external links within your blog posts to relevant and authoritative content on the Web are an important part of onsite SEO.  Zemanta uses its proprietary semantic search engine to analyze your blog post and then find related articles to link to in addition to finding relevant photos to insert into your blog post, in-text links, and even tag recommendations.  If you register your blog with Zemanta and they accept your submission, your blog might now show up inside the Zemanta results on someone else’s WordPress dashboard, potentially creating more relevant backlinks for your website.

The power of WordPress is in its plugin architecture, so utilize these WordPress plugins to take full advantage of it and make your blog-powered website more social media and SEO optimized for 2011.

Are your favorite social media and SEO WordPress plugins for 2011 included on this list?

Neal Schaffer is a recognized leader in helping businesses to strategically leverage and maximize ROI from social business. Currently SVP of Social Strategies at Social 5150 as well as Green Dream Social, Neal is the author of two social media books and frequent social media speaker. Neal’s social media strategy consulting accomplishments include working for a Fortune 500 company and a celebrity with nearly 1,000,000 social media fans. How can Neal help you?

About the author Neal Schaffer

Neal Schaffer is a recognized leader in helping businesses to strategically leverage and maximize ROI from social business. Currently SVP of Social Strategies at Social 5150 as well as Green Dream Social, Neal is the author of two social media books and frequent social media speaker. Neal’s social media strategy consulting accomplishments include working for a Fortune 500 company and a celebrity with nearly 1,000,000 social media fans. How can Neal help you?

 

Visit: http://windmillnetworking.com/2010/12/13/15-best-wordpress-plugins-social-media-seo-optimized-websites-2011/

Today’s B2B and B2Ccommunicators are subject to a daily digital bludgeoning of email queries. In the years before email became popular, senders shouldered the burden of mail. The writing and mailing of a letter was a lot of work, and each new addressee meant more postage; so businesses and individuals needed to be more thoughtful and specific about whom to send things to.

Since cost-effective sending to an infinite number of people is now a reality, every little impulse can become an instant global communication, and it’s the readers who are now bearing the burden. The result: Information overload.

Email is a productive and effective technology. The convenience and flexibility of email makes it the perfect vehicle for improving a company’s communications performance, but it can eat up time faster than most other communication channels. When you get an email you have a few seconds to decide what to do: whether to defer it to a later point, to delete it or reply to it. If you decide to reply, you have only a short time to craft your response, however, even this may break down when what should be a simple once-off reply draws out to long strings of email responses.

The increase in incoming email traffic will lead to more pressure on any department, especially once one starts down the dark road of falling behind on critical replies while still facing an overwhelming incoming volume.

So if like many you feel as though you’re wading through email treacle and living a cliché of inbox non-progress, it may be time to look at better ways to declutter:

Assess and plan — Firstly, establish the quantity of incoming written communication, which response channels your customers prefer (email, SMS/Text or telephonic) and what type of contacts you mainly receive (queries, orders, complaints) then use this research to determine which response loads can be resolved directly without you mounting the keyboard.

Respond rapidly — How many times have you sent in an email to a company and received no response or only a partial answer after waiting for days? Forrester Research reports that customers expect an email response in less than two hours, and sometimes even this falls short of people’s expectations. Make your customers trust email as a reliable communication line to you by responding as quickly and comprehensively as possible.

Stick to the point — When you send an email newsletter; the subject line is your headline, the email’s purpose should be clear in the first two lines and the action expected of the recipient should be explicit. If you are routinely receiving an excess of queries after every email campaign, it may be that you are not providing all the information necessary to streamline conversions.

Deliver relevant answers — If you need to, route every query that you receive to the most appropriate respondent based on its attributes. This way your customers can be sure that their questions are answered by the person with the right skill set to address the specific issue.

Deflect emails with Web Services — Your organization might be able to offer web self-services for repeat enquiries, leading to immediate query resolution without needing constant personal involvement. Answer questions ahead of time. Take away the need for people to email you in the first place. Try putting relevant information in your signature or including an FAQ section on your website to answer those everyday questions.

Filter out unwanted email — If your inbox is bulging periodically with 2 000 messages or more; you are desperately in need of becoming a filtering ninja. Most email systems allow for filtering and sometimes you can set up an account to forward emails with certain keywords to an assistant, or to provide specific automated responses. Regardless, use filters often. Spend an hour setting up a few of these and then sit back and watch your inbox lose weight.

Use email search, not email folders — According to a study by IBM Research; if you file your emails into folders, you’re wasting time. The 345-user study found that people who used the search function in their email program could find relevant emails as easily as those who had categorized each email into a folder. The likelihood of finding the intended email was no greater when it had been filed in a folder. Therefore, preparatory behaviors such as relying on complex filing systems are inefficient and do not improve retrieval and response speeds.

Turn off new email notifications — If you’re getting invasive notifications of new email, just turn those off. They can be a constant distraction that only increases your feeling of overload. It can be very hard to be productive and get real work done with endless pop-ups about new email; especially since the majority of email can wait for a little while until you can deal with it.

Autoresponders are your friends — The best tool in the automation process is an email autoresponder. Your autoresponder should take the same route as your email signature by anticipating people’s needs and provide solutions beforehand. Let them know where to get the information they want and tell them whom to contact for certain special requests.

Leave no email unanswered — When customers take the time to send an email, they expect a quick and meaningful response. As a preferred interaction channel, email communication is an effective way for organizations to answer questions, resolve issues and guide people along the customer journey. So care is required to avoid causing frustration by ensuring responses are consistent and timely.

Once you’ve worked up the ladder of inbox optimisation and automation, you will undoubtedly still be left with some messages that require human interaction. However, independent of content and who the person behind a customer enquiry is, each communication is important and can be seen as a litmus test of your service performance.

Even if you are in a position where there is no way for you to halt the daily email invasion, the most important thing to remember is that every problem has a solution. Examine the guidelines above and get technology working for you, instead of the other way around.

Article Overview: While this edition is based on our experiences as a provider of branding services to mid-sized companies, organizations of all sizes will benefit from this advice. Small, but growing companies will gain insights on how to avoid future branding dilemmas as they head to mid-market size. Larger organizations will benefit too from the ability to better understand their supply chain partners, many of which are mid-market entities. And mid-sized companies will gain new respect for the importance of branding to their success.

The term “mid-sized company” has been broadly defined as an entity earning anywhere from $5 million to $500 million in annual sales. That’s a heck of a range that includes public and private companies, global entities, regional powerhouses, entrepreneurial organizations, non-profit institutions, family-run businesses, and even corporate divisions. Despite the broad range in dollars, there are a number of branding challenges common to mid-sized organizations. The 11 listed below are the most prevalent, based on Delia Associates’ four decades of experience in brand development and branding services for this broad market category:

1) Reactive Approach to Brand Development
Often, an event triggers brand development or re-branding. Signaling comments include, “We have a major tradeshow coming up. . .” or, “We’re being featured in a major publication and want to place an ad, but we don’t know how to position ourselves.” With neither a plan nor procedures, your company simply “reacts” to opportunities for exposure.

2) Branding Initiatives Lack Accountability (Return on Branding Investment, ROBI)
No formal metrics are in place to determine the effectiveness of branding initiatives, which may include advertising, direct marketing, public relations, and web activity. Often, the basis for continuing an initiative resides in gut instinct, and the effectiveness of branding initiatives is weighed after the fact. Without metrics, you can’t tell whether the result was good, bad, or average. All you know is that you invested “X,” the sales result was “Y,” and in the short-term, you’re happy.

3) Can’t Bring Branding Initiatives to Conclusion
Many companies make a series of false marketing starts, or start strong and lose focus, which leads to comments like, “We have a website in development . . .”, or “We’re working on a new corporate brochure . . .” The senior executive may be too involved in the process, or the project may have been delegated to an unqualified staff person. I’ve had a number of great interns at Delia Associates, some of whom I hired, and others who have moved on to promising marketing careers elsewhere. No matter how bright these individuals were, they were not qualified to develop and deliver a company’s online brand single handedly, and it would have been unwise to expect them to do so.

4) “Who Are We Today” Syndrome
If you haven’t constructed a core brand foundation, each branding initiative represents a “re-invention of the wheel” that requires rethinking of your company’s position, key values, image, and core focus. What should be a simple new product announcement turns into a debate about the company’s past, present, and future with everyone asking, “Who do we REALLY want to be when we grow up?”

5) Competition “Stole” the Business Away from Us
We frequently get calls from companies that have lost a major piece of business, often to a direct or emerging competitor. The top executive will complain that the competitor is inferior, yet stole the customer. What companies in these situations fail to realize is that branding has more to do with perception than with reality. If a customer believes a competitor is better than you, it’s true, pure and simple.

6) “We’re in a Commodity Business.”
Due to competitors using price-cutting tactics essentially to buy market share, perceived value is being driven out of the business. As a result, you may be forced to drop prices or add value simply to hang onto existing business. Meanwhile, branding takes a back seat. In truth, every company, by virtue of its existence, is remarkable in some way. And every industry sector has a value curve of companies, from true commodity suppliers to industry innovators. Who do you think is making more money?

7) “Branding Doesn’t Work in Our Industry”
This statement is often paired with, “Branding is a necessary evil.” These comments are usually spoken by casualties of poorly executed marketing or bad marketing advice. The speakers have been stung once and won’t be so easily stung again. The truth is, branding does work, as evidenced by the successes achieved by companies that have achieved brand status.

“Everybody Knows Us.”
Any company in business for ten years or more has name recognition, especially if it services a well-defined industry. The better question is, “What do people THINK about you?” Your customers know you for what you do for them, but they may not know your full range of capabilities, or how to make qualified referrals on your behalf. Your customer contacts may disappear, or customers may simply forget to call you in a time of need.

9) Unrealistic Expectations
“We sent out a mailing and nothing happened.” This common complaint gets back to accountability and ROBI. What did you expect from a single mailing? The biggest reason for branding failures is that companies lack the tenacity to stay the course. They bail out prematurely and cite failure. The truth is that it takes, on average, seven brand impressions to get on the radar of a qualified prospect, let alone convert that prospect into a customer.

10) “Nobody Knows Us.”
Many organizations place more emphasis on selling than on branding. With a highly capable sales team to drive opportunity, an organization will grow, but that won’t replace the power of branding. If you’re a $10 million company with about 100 key clients, your brand is very important to those 100 customers. But the rest of the world could care less, until you give them a reason to care. Also, I’ve met a number of talented sales professionals in my career. But I have yet to meet one that can simultaneously deliver his or her brand message to thousands of clients and prospects, 24/7/365.

11) “We Don’t Have the Budget.”
Nearly every company we’ve talked to IS spending money on its brand. Companies may not be tracking it or considering it a brand investment, but they are investing all the same. Golf outings, client dinners, company gifts, sporadic ads, tradeshow appearances, presentations, hats, tee-shirts, new brochures, updating the company website—that’s all spending on a brand.

To make the most of marketing investments, you need to start tracking your spending on these activities. Next, determine whether you would be better served by investing differently. If you don’t have a budget, establish one for next year. Business-to-business companies spend an average of 2-3% of annual sales on branding. Business-to-consumer organizations tend to spend 5% or up to 10% if they are in serious growth mode. Retailers spend even more because they rely completely on branding efforts to create selling opportunities. Averages are a good starting point for determining how much you should allocate to branding next year.

Ask a technical founder about his startup, and he’ll proudly describe his stunning software — simple, compelling, useful, fun. Then he’ll describe his cutting-edge platform — cloud-based, scalable, distributed version control, continuous integration, one-click-deploy. Maybe you’ll even get a wobbly demo.

“Great,” I always exclaim, sharing the thrill of modern software development, “so how will people find out about this brilliant website?”

Four uncomfortable seconds later, a smile breaks across the founder’s face. “Here it comes,” I think, “there is a strategy after all!”

Except the “strategy” is a tirade of drivel I’ve heard so many times I can lip-sync as the words spew out the founder’s mouth:

• “We’re going to A/B-test AdWords campaigns until we discover our hook.”
• “We’re going to A/B-test our landing pages until the right message appears.”
• “We’re better than everyone else at SEO.”
• “A friend of mine knows how to get popular on Twitter.”
• “We’re going to get reviews on blogs.”
• “We’re going to start with our own network and grow it from there.”
• “We’re going to use an affiliate program so our customers sell it for us.”
• “We’re putting a ‘Retweet’ button inside the product to encourage viral growth.”

The obvious problem is that every new startup on Earth says exactly these things. Nowadays the “strategy” above sounds the same as:

• “We’ll have a website so people can read about us.”
• “We’ll have an email address so people can communicate with us without picking up the phone.”

Yes, you’re going to do those things, but since millions of other people are doing that too, you’re still invisible. Visibility-fail. Anyone-gives-a-crap-fail.

OK, so what can you do to rise above the cacophony that is the Internet? Here come a few ideas; leave more and discuss in the comments!

Infection built-in, not bolt-on

WhenBusy is a bootstrapped startup that lets people schedule meetings with you in currently-available time-slots without you having to share your calendar [disclosure: I'm an advisor]. For example, here’s what the founder’s (Josh Baer) availability looks like:

Instead of trading emails with lists of available time-slots, Josh just sends the link to this page and the other person uses the product to schedule a meeting. This is the viral step: Having trialed the tool, the stranger might use it herself, then more people find out about it, and so forth.

Note that at no point did I say “a button lets people ‘like’ this on Facebook.” I know of no companies who have “gone viral” because of buttons. Buttons are good — why not use them? — but they don’t make your product intrinsically viral like WhenBusy.

Which is OK — not all products need to be viral! But if it’s not viral you still need a killer method of finding customers, and if it is supposed to be viral it better be encoded in the DNA of the application, not bolted on as an afterthought.

Frightening honesty

Balsamiq Mockups is a ludicrously popular wire-framing tool. The software is good — don’t get me wrong — but what sets Peldi (the founder) apart isn’t prescient feature selection or bug-free releases, it’s his startling transparency. He published revenue figures even when they were still pathetic, he pledged loudly and eagerly to give away lots of free copies to non-profits, and he revealed all his (remarkably effective) marketing strategies (updated here) even though it meant competitors would learn them too.

He didn’t just have an “authentic voice,” he made public promises. That’s compelling.

He didn’t just “tell it like it is,” he gave up his marketing secrets and opened his company books. That’s newsworthy.

This isn’t merely “being human” and all that claptrap, it’s almost too much honesty, like when you ask someone how it’s going and they tell you about a weird pustule on their middle toe that’s been oozing since last Wednesday.

In a world where everyone and their brother is “joining the conversation” (oops, I use that phrase constantly!), you have to truly bare your soul if you want to compete on the transparency front. It’s not for everyone, and I’m not suggesting it ought to be, but there’s no sense in half-assing it.

Making Oprah cry

The number one mistake founders make when trying to generate press is talking about what the company does rather than telling a compelling story.

Does Twitter get press when it helps Iranians fight an illegitimate government or when it creates a new internal IT process to increase up-time? Does Apple win the hearts (yes, hearts) of millions because of their obsession with design or because of their development APIs? Does 37signals have over three million users because their software is “better” than the competition, or is it because they motivate designers and entrepreneurs through their writing and philosophy?

Without a powerful narrative, your chances of getting big press and enthusiastic users who spread the word for you approach zero as a limit.

It took me years to figure this out at Smart Bear. At first when someone asked what the Smart Bear tool suite was, I would say:

Smart Bear makes data-mining tools for version control systems.

It’s a description so esoteric that, although accurate, not even a hardcore geek would have any idea what it is, much less why it’s useful.

Years later, when it was clear that code review software became our sole focus, I got better at describing it:

You know how Word has “track changes” where you can make modifications and comments and show them to someone else? We do that for software developers, integrating with their tools instead of Word and working within their standard practices.

Better, yes, and for a while I thought I nailed it, but still no press. Eventually (thanks to helpful journalists) I realized that I was still just describing what it is rather than why anyone cares. I left it up to the reader to figure out why she should get excited.

Eventually I developed stories like the following, each tuned to a certain category of listener. Here’s the one for the journalists:

It’s always fun to tell a journalist like you that we enable software developers to review each other’s code because your reaction is always: “Wait a minute, you’re seriously telling me they don’t do this already?” The idea of editing and review is so embedded in your industry you can’t imagine life without it, and you’re right! You know better than anyone how another set of eyeballs finds important problems.

Of course two heads are better than one, but developers traditionally work in isolation, mainly because there’s a dearth of tools which help teams bridge the social gap of an ocean, integrate with incumbent tools, and are lightweight enough to still be fun and relevant.

That’s what we do: Bring the benefits of peer review to software development.

Now the reason for excitement is clear: We’re transforming how software is created, applying the age-old techniques of peer review to an industry that needs it but where it’s traditionally too hard to do. That’s a story.

It took me five years to figure out (a) I needed a story and (b) what the story was. It’s hard. But one story beats a pile of AdWords A/B tests.

Advertising → [transmogrification] → Revenue

Yeah yeah, nowadays marketing is about “relationships” and “authority” and other things which cost time but not money. It’s all I hear about anymore.

But don’t be so quick to throw out the idea of spending money to make money. Advertising isn’t dead; you can still buy eyeballs. I’m not talking about “triage” strategies like buying AdWords linking to a page of ads, I’m just pointing out that most companies on Earth don’t depend on “joining the conversation” to acquire customers.

It sounds simple: The average cost of acquiring a customer is $C (advertising, sales, support, doing demos) and the lifetime revenue you get from that customer is $R, so if C < R you have a business. C can be driven down with cheaper ads, better lead quality, a more efficient conversion rate, and straightforward trials with minimal tech support.

Of course it’s not that simple, and many business plans I’ve seen (unintentionally) omit many of the true costs of acquisition. Read this great interview with Sean Ellis at VentureHacks for a great discussion of how to seek a repeatable, profitable model where C < R, and then optimize and grow. It’s a little heavy on the “huge VC-style company” strategy for my style, but you’ll come away with a strong perspective on how to build a machine that turns advertising dollars into (a greater number of) revenue dollars.

Celebrity Championship

I already beat you to death about how celebrity endorsement can serve as an untouchable competitive advantage, and it’s also an answer to how to burst out of the dull roar of Internet marketing.

Take me. I’m no Seth Godin, but consider what I could do if I were a co-founder in a new software development tool company:

• I have personal relationships with the CEOs and other influencers at hundreds of software development companies. During ideation, they would brainstorm. During beta-testing they would be guinea pigs. After release of v3.0 some would be ready to become paying customers.
• I have relationships with editors of nearly all software development publications (on-line and off); I’ve already published articles with them. Some would help vet our stories, some would publish our articles.
• I’ve bought ads in every major (and quite a few minor) software development websites, magazines, newsletters, conferences, and webinars. So when it’s time to advertise, we’ll come in with the right message for the audience and probably cut a deal.
• If you read this blog you’re probably a software developer, so even just a few mentions here might be more powerful than $10,000 in A/B tested Google AdWords.
• If we were trying to raise money, my previous success would not only get us the initial meetings but would be a significant bump in our chance of raising it.

While everyone else is mucking about with a new blog, blasting their LinkedIn network with pleading emails, and paying out the nose to test AdWord variants, we’re years ahead in the marketing war.

Written by Kerry O’Malley Monday, 29 August 2011 17:32

Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave for months, you know that the U.S. economy is in some serious trouble. There are very few industries that haven’t been affected by the country’s economic woes. In times like this, it is the natural inclination of business owners to start cutting employees and departments considered to be extraneous to the company’s core revenue source. It’s no secret that marketing and advertising are usually at the top of the list. I’ve always considered this to be a “shooting yourself in the foot” mentality, and I’m not alone. “Successful companies do not abandon their marketing strategies in a recession; they adapt them,” said John Quelch, Harvard Business School. The author of the hugely successful book, “Guerilla Marketing,” and a powerful advertising executive, Jay Conrad Levinson said, “Marketing is not an event . . . It has a beginning, a middle, but never an end, for it is a process. You improve it, perfect it, and change it, but you never stop it.”

I believe a tough economy presents companies with opportunities to gain ground on their competitors. Some will stop marketing altogether, and as their name disappears from your industry’s landscape, you can capture the “top of mind” position with your customers and prospects. Some of your competitors simply won’t remain stable through the downturn and they will either go out of business or become an acquisition for a larger company. Either way, the company that finds creative marketing strategies and continues to make marketing a high priority will be on top when the economy once again gains solid footing.

Here are some things to consider and evaluate to help you keep your marketing program on track, even in a bad economy.

Make education a priority and don’t be afraid to try new things.

Whether it’s you or someone else in your company responsible for marketing, get up to speed on the latest trends, particularly as they relate to your industry. Where are your target customers going for industry information, and what opportunities do those sources offer for advertising and promotion? You may have been on auto-pilot, advertising in the same magazines and going to the same trade shows for years. Have you explored online marketing opportunities? Online versions of trade publications, E-zines, email marketing, and social media like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook all provide great promotional opportunities for minimal cost. Now is the perfect time to get up to speed on some of the non-traditional, online marketing methods and dive in. You need to understand and take advantage of ALL of your marketing options.

If your website is getting outdated (more than 3 years old!), invest in a new one that is search engine optimized and built to draw more traffic.

Particularly if you are cutting back on print advertising and trade show attendance, your website must become an even more powerful marketing tool. The technology used to develop websites is constantly changing. Just as the search engines constantly change their methods for providing search results, so software and web developers must keep improving the plug-ins and tactics they use within a web site to make it more of a search engine magnet. A current, keyword rich, search engine optimized website; Blog; and social media presence are the recipe for landing on the first page of Google search results. Compared to ongoing print advertising, displays at large, national trade shows, and more traditional marketing tactics, a sound online strategy is a bargain in terms of cost.

Look for ways your company can provide solutions or relief to your customers – and then promote the heck out of it.

Take the time to really understand how the current economic situation is affecting your customers, and then do everything your company’s resources will allow to provide solutions or relief. Remember that all of your customers are feeling the stress of the economic downturn, just like you. Now is the time to think about ways of relieving their stress as well as the solutions your products and services offer.

Many of your competitors are just coasting, and have cut back on R&D. If you have the ability to develop or improve on products that will help your customers save money, do it.

Recognize your customers’ challenges on your Blog, and offer advice, technical assistance, and solutions.

Do you have an engineer who can offer live support through your website? There are lots of “Live Chat” plug-ins that are easy enough to incorporate into your existing website.

How about sponsoring events at your facility that are just for fun, but provide some much needed relief from the stress of the day to day grind?

Do you offer “lunch and learn” sessions where you educate customers on various topics related to your products or services? What if you go a step further, and along with your lunch and learn you make a massage therapist available for 15 minute “mini” massages after the meeting?

All of these ideas are things you can promote on your website, Blog, social media pages, and in other direct marketing tactics. Show you care – then make sure your customers know it! Believe me, the companies who offer something more today will be remembered when the economy turns around.

Review all of your current advertising activities and look for ways to get more bang for your buck.

Unless you’re a Fortune 500 company you’ve probably already cut back on your print advertising as compared to 4 or 5 years ago. Let’s face it: it’s expensive. Running a full page ad in a well circulated trade publication can cost between $5,000 and $9,000 PER AD! Yes, there are less expensive alternatives to print ads: email marketing, advertising on trade related websites, and even direct mail can be much less expensive. However, I would never recommend that you cut out your print ads completely. 

First, review the BPA audit statements of all the magazines in which you currently advertise. You might be advertising in two or three publications with a high percentage of cross over in readership. If so, cut one out.

You can also make your ad more to the point and reduce the size of your ad. Even in a half or third page ad, creative use of color and text will draw the eye.  Smaller ads aren’t ideal for image building or branding.  If this is your priority, you’ll probably have to stick with the full page; but maybe you can reduce the number of print ads and ramp up your online advertising on the publication’s website.

And finally, while publishers are a little hungrier for business, I suggest you (or your agency) become better at negotiating sweeter deals. Since you’ll be running more ads in one magazine (because you’ve dropped one or two with cross over) you’ll have more bargaining power. If the publication is bi-monthly, offer to pay for 5 ads and ask for the 6’th for free. Or pay for all the ads but ask for some free advertising on the publication’s website.

And if you really don’t feel comfortable asking for something specific, put the ball in your rep’s court and just ask, “What can you do for us that X and Y Magazines (their competitors) won’t?” You don’t “get” if you don’t ask.

Evaluate whether or not you need to make staff changes.

It’s the marketing that has to continue . . . not necessarily an internal team making it happen. This is a sensitive subject, as most employers do have a heart and don’t relish the thought of laying anyone off. However, business is business. Maybe it’s time to consider whether or not you really need a full-time graphic designer or marketing manager on staff. There are many experienced marketing professionals in every discipline who freelance for large corporations. When you compare the true cost of a full time marketing professional (benefits package, vacations, bonuses, etc.) with the cost to retain a “virtual” marketing manager, even if you hire a junior marketing assistant to coordinate activities internally, the cost will be much less than a seasoned marketing manager or director.

Marketing in today’s economy may be more challenging; but there’s no reason your marketing efforts have to come to a grinding halt. Look at how you market with a fresh pair of eyes, and you may be surprised at how much more you can accomplish – for a lot less money.