Not trust in us. Trust in yourself. Trust that the decision you’re about to make is the right one; even before the plan is fully formed, even before the numbers prove it out.

The nervous system problem

Most business owners we meet are running on adrenaline. Watching the bank balance. Waiting for the next enquiry. Bracing for the other shoe to drop.

And when you’re bracing, it can be hard to make good marketing decisions. Instead, decisions can become defensive. Cut the ad spend. Pause the campaign. Go quiet on socials right when you need to be loud. Not because it’s the smart commercial call, but because it’s the safe-feeling one.

Marketing decisions made in panic are rarely good ones. They’re reactive, not strategic. And they tend to prove the fear right, which just feeds the next round of panic.

What good actually looks like

We’ve watched it happen the other way too. A business owner takes a leap, starts posting again on an account that’s gone quiet, puts a bold offer out, has the hard conversation about pricing, and something shifts. Not because the plan was perfect. Because they trusted the move enough to make it, and then let the plan catch up.

That’s an order that can actually work

• Trust first – a settled nervous system, not a spreadsheet, is where good decisions start.
• Plan second – once you can think clearly, you can better consider what’s actually going to move the needle for your business, rather than just responding to what feels urgent.
• Do third –  execute the plan. Consistently. Without pulling the plug the moment it feels uncertain.

Permission to feel good about it

If things are starting to click – an enquiry lands, a campaign gets traction, a decision finally feels obvious instead of agonising – let yourself feel good about that. Don’t wait for proof it’ll last before you’ll allow it.

That good feeling isn’t naivety. It’s validation. It’s your business telling you the direction is right, even if the destination isn’t fully built yet.

Provincial business owners are often the last people to permit themselves to enjoy a good few weeks. There’s always the next worry queued up. But sitting with what’s working, even briefly, is part of what lets you keep making clear-headed decisions rather than fear-driven ones.

Building a different operating system

This isn’t about ignoring the numbers or pretending cash flow doesn’t matter. It’s about recognising that most businesses don’t have a marketing problem. Many have a nervous system problem that’s been dressed up as bad luck or a poor market.

We reckon fix the order –  trust, then plan, then do – and the marketing decisions get easier. Less noise. More traction.

That’s the operating system we help build.

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Marketing capability – it’s the one thing most businesses need. Known for delivering consistent growth and opportunities for scale, it is still often (and somewhat ironically) overshadowed by campaigns.

A campaign is spending money on ads or promotions. It can be an event or experience. It’s about creating noise and hoping your audience will catch on, see the commotion, consider your core message and want to take the next step – be that develop an affinity for your brand, go to your website, make an enquiry, or the holy grail, make a purchase.

A campaign can be assessed. Celebrated when it drives results, or ‘worth a go’ if it doesn’t. A campaign is arguably more tangible simply because it attends to the ego’s need to see its brand in market.  No judgement. We’ve all been there. It’s that moment you see your brand in market, and you think, yeah, this should do it.

And sometimes it does ‘do it’. A campaign brings in a few new sales. A handful of leads. Maybe some new contacts. More eyeballs to your website. Heck, done well, if you hit the influencer jackpot, a good campaign might transform your business.

For a while. Until you find yourself scrambling to catch up because something as innocuous as a distribution system derails your previously flawless customer service rating.

Spikes in sales are rewarding. But what if you could repeatedly and predictably generate demand, independent of any single campaign?

What if marketing went from something you did when sales were slow to part of how decisions are made? Or if campaigns went from being a life raft to an accelerator.  If, rather than hoping for a result, you could intentionally drive an outcome through thoughtful experimentation (not just guesswork).

That’s what building marketing capability within your business can do.  It’s a framework to follow. A structural ability to do marketing well, over and over.  It takes time (sure) and quite likely some investment to develop, yet time and again, successful brands have proven the value of that investment by demonstrably outperforming competitors, even in a downturn.

So what exactly is marketing capability?

1. Strategic clarity – clear positioning,  a defined target audience, a strong differentiated value proposition and a consistent messaging platform. Being clear on who you are, what you stand for and what you bring to the market should be the anchor point for all marketing.
2. Systems and processes – this doesn’t have to be the most advanced marketing technology stack for it to work. A simple set of agreed principles and processes can fundamentally shift an organisation’s marketing capability.   Implementing a campaign planning process, or adding discipline to your content calendar, can reduce the mental load of thinking about how or what to do. It can also increase the likelihood of success of an action because a process, by definition, requires reflection and optimisation. Every time you go to market using a set process as your base, you begin to increase your chances of success markedly.
3. Data and feedback loops – you’ll see it everywhere, data is king. It has been since the noughties (ok let’s admit it, even earlier).  Even in the snail mail direct marketing days, we were tracking data and creating feedback loops so we could better track cost per lead, conversion rates, customer lifetime value and insights that might direct our next move. Today, there’s a plethora of data available through digital channels. Without strategic clarity, though, and a marketing framework that knows how to look for the right insights, that data can become overwhelming and insufficient in its impact.
4. Internal ownership – who owns marketing in your organisation? For most SME’s, the answer is the owner, admin or ‘we have this [person] who is really good on Canva, and so we get to help out from time to time’.  It’s someone’s job but also no one’s job and so marketing becomes a bolt on – aka, back to that life-raft.  Developing marketing as a capability requires someone to be accountable for the marketing outcomes – brand positioning, filling the pipeline with quality, consistent leads, and matching brand to commercial outcomes. And so the list goes on.
5. Building a brand platform – in our business, we often refer to this as the Coca-Cola effect. In almost any country in the world, you can see that red, that font, and you can immediately imagine the sensation of those cold cola bubbles as they cascade down your parched little traveller throat.  The reason we can imagine that sensation so vividly? Exposure. And it’s intentional. Coke has systematically stayed loyal to and embedded a consistent tone, narrative and visual identity over decades. You can’t help but associate those tiny brand markers with the story you have been told about how Coke should make you feel, and the known experience of the product itself. Other brands, like Apple, build iconic campaigns derived from obsessive marketing positioning, a clear narrative and a complete commitment to delivering what they know the customer wants. In Apple’s case, this is exceptional design, strong retail experiences and unique product definition.

Capability is not more ads. It’s not hiring a bigger, brighter agency (not yet anyway – they do have their place!) And it’s not rebranding every couple of years to create more noise in market. It’s about leverage.

Building marketing as a core function within your business so you can build commercial strategy that understands what a good customer looks like (and how to connect with them). That delivers your business repeatable growth. And that enables your brand to grow a strong reputation in market. That is marketing capability: it’s growth by design. Not by accident.
 

The post Why you need marketing capability, not just noisy promotions. appeared first on MLAB.

When it comes to the tricky stuff, we outsource the development to the experts. We do the thinking and planning – the brief. Then we’ll support with copywriting, more thinking and project management stuff.

None of this, however, answers the question, why do we work on a lot of websites?

So here it is.

Websites are the new ‘shop window’. OK not that new, they’ve been around for a few years now. But despite this, it seems that, for many small businesses, the website equation is more closely aligned to the idea of “here’s a place for everything I’ve ever wanted to tell people about my business” vs. “what might my customers want to use my website for?”

The distinction between these questions is important. One is about you – the business owner. The other focuses on your customer – the people paying you to do whatever it is you do.

Sometimes those people want a bright shiny information-filled thesis because what you do is sell ideas and they need to know you have some.

Other times those people need to know when, what, why and how much because what they want is to buy the thing then and there. Then sometimes prospective customers just want to confirm that you’re a real business and not a bot imitating a human. A website can be so many things.

The reasons we, as fundamental marketers, work on all these websites is the P’s. As in the marketing P’s…and the one we call on with websites is primarily the P called Place – where do I find out about what you do and how do I buy all that glorious stuff you have?

Place is really important. It is why people spend so much time and effort thinking about where they will have their bricks and mortar store; what that store will look like and who they will employ to meet and greet prospective customers.

Or why they spend so much time and effort considering why a brick-and-mortar store isn’t for them but instead they’re better off with a different distribution model.

Or why they spend so much time and effort on networking with prospects on the golf course, despite not really knowing the difference between an iron or a wedge or a wood, or why there is a shot count called a birdie.

It’s all about Place. Being there, and being there in the right capacity.

We often meet people who want to increase the awareness of their brand. They want to justify a price point or build their pipeline. But their website is letting them down. They might have the best, most engaging brand story about how their new app for middle-aged housewives helps save the rare spotted grey couch bird in the wild and has the cutest little packages ever, and the price point might be spot on (ha, ’scuse the pun). But if the website is more government-authority than the hipster version of Richard Attenborough, chances are, their audience will turn off.

Websites matter because your product, your business and your brand need to be baked in from the start. Websites are your Place. Your front door. Your welcome sign. Your first hello and ‘can I help you.’

We don’t work on a lot of websites just because it’s fun (which incidentally it is.) We work on websites because every website should be working hard… and we get them to do just that.

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So what’s a business to do?

It might feel natural to button down the hatches. Rip up the marketing plan. Hunker down til the tsunami passes.  It might feel natural, but history (facts and stuff) tell us otherwise.

America is arguably the king of recession (what a monarchy to lord over!)

They’ve experienced a fair few recessionary moments: tough stuff that’s disrupted financial markets, and upset commercials and commodities alike. Many a company folded. Then like a swarm of phoenixes rising from the ashes appeared such ‘overnight successes*’ as Burger King, MailChimp, Air BnB, Groupon, Uber and even Nespresso.

All these businesses held something in common. They recognised gaps in consumer spending and remodelled, repositioned and doubled down to reimagine their business.

MailChimp was a business focused on large corporates. A post-recession pivot saw it focus primarily on smaller businesses, building cost-effective methods for SMEs to connect with their audience. The monkey mail gurus grew by tailoring new services and a brand that connected with the actual needs of their newly defined market.

Then there’s Nespresso. Love it or hate it, this simple coffee maker became the at-home caffeine alternative for cash-strapped consumers, almost everywhere.  Nespresso didn’t just pop a few discount promotional campaigns onto Facebook though. Nope, they held their premium price, got George Clooney to smile that mega-watt smile of his, and built a deeply storied brand.

But what if you’re not a Silicon Valley poster child? Fear not good readers, here is our non-technical guide to marketing in a technical recession

Some notes we made

Not every brand seeks the hockey stick growth of a modern tech start-up, but almost every brand (where there is a passionate pioneer at the helm) wants their business to survive a recession. So here are our tippy-tip-tips:

• Don’t be afraid to launch new products to market: Holy Batman, what?  We get it, new product launches and R&D are risky even in the good times. It probably feels like time to ditch the diamond-crusted idea and stick to your knitting. Unless your knitting isn’t right for your market!  Let’s face it, your market is also going through their own recession experience. The key is to know what that market seeks, where the gaps are, where you can slot in with a new, better solution. The experts reckon mid-recession is the time to launch  (we’re not far from it!) Here there is light at the end of the tunnel, and when light appears, wallets begin to loosen.

• Be careful with promotional spending: We know that during a recession consumers reduce their spending on stuff, and on things. So why would a business increase its budget for sales promotions and tactical campaigns? Hopefully, they won’t.  Short-term tactics, and see-sawing price promotions, might turn heads but in a recession, they are unlikely to move the dial on revenue. Some promotion won’t hurt, but this isn’t the time to double down on a deal.

• Increase time and dollars spent on brand: Honest to Batman, again what? OK, stay with us here. Brand is the ‘why’ – it connects people to something deeper. Builds a connection. There is plenty of evidence supporting the idea that brands who switch their tactical spend to brand spend during a recession, will report bigger profit increases than competitors who do the opposite. It could even be time to examine your core.

• Invest in the foundations of why, what and how: If the market is running a bit cooler, now is the time to get deep into the business. Build that storied brand (if it doesn’t already exist). Aggressively define your customer avatar, understand their pain points and their desires, and make sure your offering is uniquely yours. Play with your COGS, look at margins, and profit centres, and consider the in-market pricing. Reconsider the strength of your channels to market, you support (feeder) channels, and your buyer journey. There’s often so much to reflect on, the recession will probably roll by in a hot minute.

All the tips aside, we understand that not everyone can invest or redirect spend during a recession. Hopefully though, with our tidbits above, you can assess the priorities of your spending based on the knowledge gained by so many, during similar times.

*as one client once put it, “It only took me 30 years to become an overnight success”…the same is true for recessionary hero brands. 

The post The non technical guide to marketing in a technical recession appeared first on MLAB.

Marketing Content

More fashionably known as content marketing, this category of content sells people on you – your story, your vision, you purpose, your perspective. It sells (or at least tells) people more about your brand.

Contrary to what the Instagram algorithm wants you to believe, there is no silver bullet with content marketing. One piece of content might deliver a spike in sales but it wont solve the problem of consistent, reliable dollars in the door.

In the parable of the tortoise and the hare, content is the tortoise.  It’s a slow, steady conversation that turns followers and readers into advocates, ambassadors, or even better fans! It takes time to have an impact, and you need to understand the numbers to unpack the impact. But just like the tortoise, content helps you win the race.

One pundit years ago referred to good content marketing as being charming. It’s apt –  good content spins a yarn, it tells you about the business, the people, the values that you might share. It creates a teeny tiny space in your consumer mind that helps you to remember, and recall, a brand or product name.

Overtime, good content marketing charms consumers into a sale. It’s easier to choose if you first understand ‘why this brand’ amidst the flurry of other offers and brands you see each day. Marketing content plans the seed, waters it and nurtures it to grow.

Sales content

Sales content on the other hand is about as charming as an angry badger. And quite frankly, sales could care less. The purpose of sales is not to charm, it is to wow. In contrast to the seed analogy above, Sales Content is the market stall.

Sales content convinces using statistics, awards, sales figures – all designed to show you that this is the brand or product for you. Sales content is everywhere. It’s the ads on TV through to the “this could be you” promises of instant success “if only you…[insert solution.]” 

Good sales content isn’t self aggrandising though. It’s confident, understands the audience and to the point.

Balancing content: marketing vs. sales.

You need both. Content marketing  fosters that all important relationship.  In a digital, otherwise disconnected world, content is the  account manager you might have had in years gone by. It not only captures hearts and minds, it informs, educates and supports buyer decisions by using words, videos or imager to help overcome objections or barriers to purchase.

Sales content, on the other hand, is designed to the whet the appetite, highlight the possibilities and appeal directly to your wallet, ego, fears and desires. It converts prospers to customers.

There’s no magic formula for the percentage of content that should be marketing vs. sales. It differs by brand, product, industry, category and of course audience.  Overtime a business can assess the balance that is right for them: the balance the drives the stickiest, best kind of customer…not just the quick win.

The post The difference between content that connects and content that converts. appeared first on MLAB.

What is a digital footprint?

It refers to all the ways a suspect (or prospect) can begin to discover, engage and interact with your business or brand. A functioning digital footprint might seek to ensure:

• Your business can easily be discovered online through organic or paid search; And/or
• Direct traffic to your site increases organically;
• Or your paid advertising on Google or social media is part of a bigger plan;
•  And that all digital interactions your brand has with your audience connect them to your brand and build value off each other.

Clear so far right?

The ultimate goal of a digital footprint

This is to use a range of channels (online) to achieve a singular goal – e.g. typically the reason you’ll use social for a brand is to get people to your website to enquire or buy.  The sequence might look like:

•  Post regular and relevant posts on social media
• To increase followers on social media,
• And those followers interact and engage with your brand more frequently
• This means, more people will begin to know about the brand and your business
• Which increases the likelihood of people finding your website address
• And with more people at the top of the funnel (prospects) you have a better chance of converting some new leads.

Ways to get people to your website:

• Social – Insta, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn
• Blog
• Newsletter
• Partner blogs or newsletters
• Partner websites
• Google My Business
• Google Search
• Google Ads
• Digital ads

And on the list goes…

How do you know if your digital footprint is connected?

First, you’ll be reaching your goals! Second, look at your analytics, often. How do people find your website, what do they look at, how long do they stay, do they come back….all of this information is in every analytics for every platform. Reading and understanding these analytics is super important. It’s the way to determine if your website, and the digital footprint that supports it, is winning, waning or wanting (changes).

The post The most basic introduction to understanding your digital footprint appeared first on MLAB.

Now is a time when reacting seems easy. Let’s face it, a pandemic crossed with a recession can feel like looking down a long dark tunnel, the light snuffed right out. It’s natural to want to do something to maintain or reignite the fire within the consumer’s wallet: to discover a unicorn solution that might provide a trickle of income.

But reacting can set you up to fail.

The main reaction we’re seeing right now is deep discounting. It is quite realistic that, without considered messaging or super-targeted offers, this could be the beginning of a price spiral. Businesses either racing to the bottom to try and get one-more-sale, or worse, being posited as a discount retailer. Think Briscoes or Kathmandu – consumers hold out for sales and very rarely purchase items at full price. For a small business, that’s a difficult place to come back from.

So how do you not react?

We’ve scoured the internet over the last few weeks, searching for direction and insights from past recessions. When we looked deep (and we did go deep), we found the same advice time and time again.

Consistently, the first step and the most important piece of advice is: Re-examine your core.

Let’s face it, you have time; something you might not have had in a pre-C19 world. Why not use it to examine your core: really look at what the changes in market, economy and consumers mean to the future of your business.

HOW TO EXAMINE YOUR CORE

There are three simple questions you can ask to begin this process:

1. What is the reason you do what do you – what is your brand story?

In a perfect world, why would someone choose your business over others in your category or industry? When sales start to decline, a lot of businesses will begin to alter their brand position to try and attract new customers in the near term.

Sadly this can mean you are in a weaker position to connect with your most valuable customers once the recession ends. They’ve witnessed the ship sinking, they’ve seen the captain changing course and they’re no longer confident that this is the brand they once believed in.  Check out our Brand ideas paper to better understand the role of brand.

2. Which marketing (promotion) worked best to date?

It’s important to keep turning up during a recession, to remain present. Turning off all communications says, we’re gone. Reigniting a brand if you’ve been silent for months is akin to launching a new business to market. It’s expensive and difficult. But we get it, spending money on promotion right now can feel futile.

We recommend you look at all of your marketing spend and work out which communications delivered you the best returns, whether that’s engagement, actual sales or just awareness. Then consider what you currently need to achieve. For many, sales just won’t be a possibility. So what levers can you pull? Where can you build value – relationship? Goodwill? Partnership?

Which channels have been most effective? Should you use email, social or digital advertising?

How do you ensure your message remains relevant, interesting and on-brand? What can you talk about authentically and with authority? If you sell message cookies, use cookies to communicate your thoughts. Don’t start posting images of trees.

Optimising your marketing message, spend and returns is critical.

3. How have your customers’ priorities changed? You had a customer base pre-C19. But what are they doing now?  It’s vital to know and respect how their thinking has changed. There are four segments that typically emerge during a recession:

• • Those that slam on the brakes: this is our vulnerable group and great caution is required if you typically market to a low-income segment. Right now, they will be hurting the most.
  • The pained but patient group: these are resilient and optimistic but make changes to their spend during difficult times. The majority here will still have some income but they’ll be more cautious of who they invest with and why.
  • Those who are comfortably well off: if you were lucky enough to market to the top 5% of income earners before C19, you can expect them to resume (even continue) spend at near-prerecession levels. They are financially secure and typically financially fit to ride out economic bumps. It’s good news if you have accessible products or services to sell.
  • Those who live for today: typically younger and more urban, these folks will just keep on rolling, so long as they have employment. Larger purchases might not be delayed. They will continue to look for experiences to get involved in. Temporary discounts will work well for this group.

These customer segments will stay until recessionary pressures ease. People will shift around between pained and patient and slamming on the brakes. Where your customers sit will determine the kind of messages, innovation or pricing they will need from you to continue to support your business. We’ve put together a high level summary in this recession marketing matrix:

Recession marketing matrix. CLICK TO EXPAND.

What should you do with this information?

These broad business insights can help you to begin to determine which strategies and tactics will help move you forward. It can help you work out whether to rationalise or innovate your product set. Whether to shift pricing. When and where to cut costs and when to focus on growth.

Taking stock of your core may mean that, once markets reopen, you might be able to trade at the same or similar prices, with the same or similar margins as before (obviously, there are industry and category exceptions here). It may also mean you have created new, better products and services. Or a more streamlined business machine.

Examining your core and responding thoughtfully can be very reassuring to your market. It demonstrates your position: ‘we’re going to get through this together‘ vs. ‘this is a sinking ship.’

There are several steps to building a strong marketing foundation, during and after recession. Examining your core is the first. But it’s important. It’s very important.

Establishing your why, your story and your baseline will set the direction for how you respond and rebuild your business after lockdown, during recession and into recovery.

The post Time to examine your core appeared first on MLAB.

If you’re lucky, if you’ve got a high involvement product or if you have a great re-targeting programme in place (hopefully you do), then that user might also look at your website on a desktop, laptop or tablet at a later date. If not, then they (and you) are stuck with a tiny screen interaction.

Despite knowing that people are on mobile devices a lot of the time,  most UX (user experience) is still designed for the big screen. And on big screen, everything is different. You can show more ‘above-the-fold’ – that’s the bit on the screen before you have to scroll down. You can have more functionality – things that fly in and out, pop ups and pop outs. You can have deep menus and people tend to spend more time on a desktop version of a website (if it’s good), so technically you can have more information.

So here we are, all designing for desktops and laptops but guess where we spend our time. We don’t even need the inimitable Mary Meeker Internet Report 2019 (which we adore btw), to answer this. We’re on mobile. All the time. We go somewhere, want to find somewhere to eat, we search “café near me”. We’re shopping, we find a top we like but don’t know the brand, we search “is XYZ brand clothing good”. We’re bored, we want to go to a movie, we search “movies on today” and Google handily does a location match so we can go to the closest theatre. We’ve all become so used to things working on mobile that we forget there is a significant amount of effort required to make it so.

We use our mobiles like default brains. We concurrently research more and less than we used to – and in the blink of an eye, we decide whether we want to spend time on a website that we’ve arrived at as a result of our search. This decision is made through any number of factors, from the way that site looks, to how easy it is to use, to whether or not you can ‘x’ out of the annoyingly large pop up that has appeared and hasn’t been optimised for small screens.

Most businesses are not mobile ready. Yeah, they’re mobile friendly – as in utilise responsive design to scale the website down to size, but mobile ready they are not.

DO I NEED TO BE MOBILE READY OR IS IT ENOUGH TO BE FRIENDLY?

For a bunch of businesses, including ours, mobile friendly is fine. We don’t rely on people (at the moment) searching for us during their commute and buying our services online. We’re more a desktop research kinda proposition and so investing heavily in a mobile ready website might not be the best use of our dollars. One day maybe, but it’s not a priority right now.

If, however, you are a seller of the latest widget – or something people could re-order online – or a tour, a café, a consumable service or product – then get mobile ready.

Mobile ready requires you to think first about the role your website plays and then to consider how that changes when people are looking at it on the go.

If you are a café for example, your website is the menu on the street or your front of house welcoming people in. In real life how do you welcome people in? And then entice them to stay? Building the online equivalent of a huge welcoming smile or even just showing your busy times, menu or specials first on your mobile ready site can be the difference between sorta interested and super interested.

What about if you re-sell coffee beans online? In that case, your website is your sales person. Would you make a person who came to buy from your store walk through three or four doors before they could get to the counter? No? Then don’t make them click through three or four pages before they can find the product they want and check out. Put the most popular products up front on the mobile home page and make it a one-click wonder to purchase (with the option to remember details too if you can!)

Mobile ready design doesn’t go as far as mobile first design (more on this another day), but it provides an infinitely better user experience than mobile friendly design. Mobile ready, in our world, simply means that you’re ready to greet, meet and engage your potential customer in the best way possible, using a specially considered and designed mobile version of your website.

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