Rohit Bhargava - Duct Tape Marketing

0 Finding Non Obvious Trends

Trends are funny things. People spend their entire careers trying to spot them, but more often than not, the prognosticators are either wrong or simply stating something that’s become obvious to others.

It’s kind of funny too because those same folks are often the first to erroneously pronounce when a trend is no longer a trend.

I remember many years ago when the mainstream media jumped on the trend of blogging and then certainly were some of the first to tell us that blogging was dead. In reality, neither was true because simply pointing out a trend often belies the true meaning of why it came into existence in the first place.

My guest on this week’s podcast is Rohit Bhargava, trend curator, founder of the Influential Marketing Group and author of the new book Non Obvious: How to Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict the Future.

Bhargava uses a method for unearthing what he calls the non-obvious trend in a way that helps you focus on why a trend is a trend and why people often miss the real opportunities behind them.

Questions I ask Rohit:

What is your methodology for finding trends?
Is it considered lucky for someone to fall upon a trend early?
How can you think about trends that may not apply to your business’ industry?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

How to find some of the non-obvious upcoming trends
How to avoid the pitfalls of trend predicting
What a “reluctant marketer” is and how to use this idea to your advantage

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Hostgator, where you’ll get 24 hour live support via chat, phone or email, 1-click WordPress installs, easy-to-use website builder, design services, marketing services like SEO and PPC, and for my listeners: a 30% Discount. Go to www.Hostgator.com/promo/ducttape

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

2 4 Ways To Sell To Customers Before They Start Looking For You

This is a special Small Business Week guest post from Rohit Bhargava.

Marketing is a pretty simple thing to describe. It encompasses all the things that you do to try and reach people who are seeking the types of products or services that you can provide. The only problem in traditional marketing is that you’re competing with everyone else who is trying to reach someone about the same thing. Want to guess how many lawn care businesses have amazing specials as the spring season starts?

charliecurve via Flickr

Instead of joining that same race, what if you could position your business to sell to your potential customers before they even realize they need you? Sounds great in theory – but there is a secret here and it has everything to do with YOU and your ability to build personal relationships with potential customers before they think you need them. This is the idea at the heart of my new book called Likeonomics – which focuses on why people do business with small business owners and companies that they like, and how real word of mouth, powerful referrals and unshakeable customer loyalty really happens. Here are a few tips on how to build a more likeable business, adapted from ideas the book:

1. Create An Online Micro Genius Bar – One of the greatest things about the Internet is that you can see all kinds of questions that people are asking about the things that you may be an expert in. Anything from plumbing questions to how to properly do taxes – your expertise is desperately needed. No one has the time to spend all day answering questions for free, but consider what might happen if you just spent 20 minutes a week looking at some of these questions online in forums or on Twitter, or on Facebook. By answering a few, and linking back to your website, you’re building goodwill, demonstrating your expertise, and putting your business in the position where as soon as someone needs help in your area … you’re their go to resource.

2. Forecast For The Obvious – There are certain undeniable moments in purchase behaviour that happen every year. Moms take their kids to buy back to school supplies in August. Guys desperately look for flowers around Valentine’s Day. One of the cleverest promotions I saw was someone from a local tree removal company handing out brochures near the outdoor market where we went one year to buy our Christmas tree. Not only did they volunteer to take away your tree for free after the holidays – but while they visited your property, they would look at your trees and tell you if any were in danger of falling and may need to be removed. If we do end up needing any tree removal, guess who I’ll call first?

3. Promote To Complimentary Customers – Customers of one product often become customers of another over time. People who just booked an island vacation, for example – may very soon realize that they need new luggage, or fitness classes to fit into that bikini. This may seem like an obvious connection, but those two events may be separated by six months. How could you build a relationship with that person well in advance so when they do get closer to their vacation, you’re already in their mind?

4. Introduce Your Business Through Social – The reason that so many businesses are so excited about the potential of Facebook advertiser is not really because of the super niche targeting so you can specific someone’s age, region, interests, etc. Instead, perhaps the coolest thing about Facebook is that often when you see an ad for something that a friend likes, it will tell you that your friend also likes that product or service. Built into the ad is a social endorsement from a friend. This can be a powerful motivator for someone to call your business when they do need to buy something because they see an opinion from a friend that they know and trust.

Rohit Bhargava is the author of the new book Likeonomics, a guide for small businesses (and anyone else!) to become more likeable and why that matters for business success. For an exclusive excerpt and special offer only for Duct Tape Marketing readers, visit www.likeonomics.com/ducttapemarketing

0 Thursday Guest Stars

Here are your guest contributors for Thursday’s edition of the Duct Tape Marketing Small Business Week iPad Giveaway.

Read each of the five posts that follow and click our entry form link to match the guest star with their post.

Keith Ferrazzi
Keith Ferrazzi is the author of Never Eat Alone and the founder of the Relationship Masters Academy, an online training program for networking that offers the structure and support to put Keith’s bestselling books into action in your life for unparalleled career success and satisfaction. Go here to learn more!

Joseph Jaffe

Joseph Jaffe is President of jaffe, LLC. His popular blog and audio podcast, “Jaffe Juice”, provides daily and weekly commentary respectively on all things new marketing. His latest book, “Flip the Funnel: How to use existing customers to gain new ones,” presents a powerful hypothesis that retention can become the new acquisition through the strategic incorporation and elevation of customer service, customer experience and customer initiated word-of-mouth, content creation and incentive-based referrals.

David Meerman Scott

David is the author of 7 books, Real-Time Marketing & PR , is his newest addition to the collection. His blog – Web Ink Now – is ranked by AdAge Power 150 as a top worldwide marketing blog. David has presented at hundreds of industry conferences and events and the marketing programs he has developed are responsible for selling over one billion in products and services worldwide.

Bob Burg

Bob Burg’s national bestseller, The Go-Giver, has been heralded as a new business classic. Bob is an advocate, supporter and defender of the Free Enterprise system, believing that the amount of money one makes is directly proportional to how many people they serve and how well they serve them. Find out more information about Bob Burg here.

Rohit Bhargava

Rohit is a founding member of the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence team, the world’s largest global network of social media strategists. His personal marketing blog called Influential Marketing has been recognized as one of the top 25 marketing blogs in the world and was featured in the Wall Street Journal. He also teaches global marketing at Georgetown University.

Sonia Simone

Sonia Simone is the senior editor of Copyblogger and a co-founder of Copyblogger Media, a company with a suite of valued marketing and training products and more than 55,000 customers. Copyblogger Media empowers online writers and content producers to command attention, create engagement, and influence people as powerful players in the new media revolution.

0 How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 1

This post is one in a series of five guest posts authored by the super star bloggers pictured below. As part of a celebration of National Small Business Week we are asking readers to match all five guests posts up with the contributing blogger to be entered for a chance to win an iPad2. Read all five posts in today’s series and come back each day this week for five new posts in this great educational series and another chance to win.

David Meerman Scott

How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 1

Say NO to squeezing your buyers. You have a choice.

When you want to get more “leads” into the top of your sales funnel, you have the option of not requiring people to register to get the valuable content that your company creates (an ebook or white paper perhaps).

Here are the three options for offering valuable information:

1. Requiring an email address (and other personal information) prior to your buyers being permitted to download content. With a gate, each person downloading becomes a valuable sales lead. This is a very typical yet flawed approach.

2. Making the content totally free with no registration required. Value comes from many more people consuming and spreading your content.

3. Implementing a hybrid scheme. This takes a leap of faith but typically pays off for those who try this controversial approach.

The vast majority of marketers choose option 1 and require a form up front to get leads. You must resist this because:

– Registration is a holdover from direct mail days (when a business reply card was the way to fulfill a white paper request). Is a direct mail technique right for today’s hyper-connected web?

– Requiring registration greatly reduces the number of people who download something. One of my ebooks has been downloaded close to one million times. With a registration requirement, I’m convinced it would be only a few thousand.

– Because bloggers do not like to send their readers to something that could cause them to get onto unwanted lists, when there is a registration requirement, very few (if any) bloggers will talk it up and you get little or no inbound links.

– When lots of people link to your stuff, you rise in the search results. For example, The MailerMailer Email Marketing Metrics Report is number one for their important phrase email marketing metrics as a result of free content. With a squeeze page, you’re lucky to get into the first 20 pages on Google for a phrase like “email marketing metrics”.

But you want leads, right? So for you option 2 (just making the content free) may not work.

That’s why when asked about this religious discussion in my live presentations, I also offer a third option, which is a hybrid.

I suggest the first offer be totally free (such as an ebook). Then within the ebook, have a secondary offer that requires registration that you can use to capture leads. A secondary offer might be a Webinar or free trial or something else of value.

This hybrid approach will both spread your ideas and generate leads!

Read the rest of today’s mystery posts here

0 How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 2

Rohit Bhargava

How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 2

There was a moment in the movie Forrest Gump where he was caught with his friend Lieutenant Dan in a huge storm on board their shrimp boat. As a storm rolls in and destroys all the boats docked at the port, Gump’s boat survives thanks to being out at sea. He comes back, ends up with a relatively monopoly over shrimp boating and gets rich.

So the obvious lesson here for getting more leads is to watch for storms and hope to be the last boat standing. Of course, that will probably be hard advice to follow if you happen to not be in the business of shrimp boating, or not really excited about the idea of having a business strategy focused on hoping for a big storm.

The irony is, that is exactly what many small businesses are doing with their marketing by placing ads in locations that are unlikely to be acted on, following ill-advised trends or advice to create social media graveyards (which never see the light of any attention or conversation), and assuming that just offering a good product or service will spread.

Hope is not a marketing strategy.

Instead, consider that leads come from many different methods. Here are a few that could be worth focusing on:

1. Show up in real life. There are dozens of events taking place in just about every region. Are you making an effort to show up and meet the right people in person?

2. Share expertise for free. Often you will be in a position where you are selling some type of expertise – but how much of it are you offering for free? Free advice, particularly online, has a way of paying off in terms of building your reputation as an expert. And reputation leads to, well, leads.

3. Make powerful friends. As the new social media adage goes – it’s not who you know, but who knows you. The more influencers who you can build relationships with, the more likely those will come back to your business directly with new leads and referrals based on what you do.

Read the rest of today’s mystery posts here

0 How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 3

Sonia Simone

How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 3

It’s funny how many of our moms’ and grandmas’ most-treasured recipes came from the backs of cans, jars, and boxes.

Recipes are irresistible — and not just the cream-of-mushroom casserole kind.

The fact is, all of us have recipes in our business — sequences of steps that can help our customers get what they want.

It might be “8 ways to take out stains,” “7 ways to save money and headaches on your kitchen remodel,” or “12 simple secrets to reducing neck and back pain.”

One of my very favorite spots for this kind of recipe is the email newsletter. More specifically, it’s the email autoresponder — a sequence of messages that gets sent to each and every new subscriber to your email list.

When you create an email sequence that forms a killer recipe, the reader develops the habit of opening each message.

Sure, he can still unsubscribe when he’s finally captured the final step. But by that time, if your recipe is good enough, you’ve created trust. Your reader has started to know and like you.

You’ve just emailed him 9 times in a row and you haven’t sent him any junk. Just valuable, good information that gets him a result he wants.

Think he’s likely to open that 10th email?

Think he’s likely to refer your autoresponder to a friend?

Think he’s likely to talk you up on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter?

You bet he is … I’ve seen in it my own business.

The recipe for a great email autoresponder

Make sure your “recipe” delivers a solution that your prospect really wants.

1. Break your recipe into a 7-10 part sequence. Whenever you can, make each one a quick standalone tip that brings immediate results.

2. Deliver your recipe using the autoresponder function of your email marketing program. If your email service doesn’t let you put together an autoresponder with as many messages as you need, consider using a new service.

3. Write the best content you can. The time you put in now can continue to work hard for your business for years to come. If writing isn’t your strong suit, this is a great time to bring in a professional copywriter — you’ll get great ROI on a relatively modest investment.

4. Rather than selling your products or services, start to “sell” your great free recipe. It will build trust and rapport, so that down the line you can fully explain all the benefits of what you do.

You’ll find it’s much easier to promote this kind of high-quality free content, particularly with social media, than it is to try to jump right to the sale of your product or service.

Deliver a great recipe for your topic, and just like that killer marinara sauce on the back of the tomato can, it will get passed along.

You’re not just bringing in leads, you’re nurturing them and building your reputation … and that’s the kind of lead generation that will keep paying off for months and years to come.

Read the rest of today’s mystery posts here

0 How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 4

Keith Ferrazzi

Keith Ferrazzi is the author of Never Eat Alone and the founder of the Relationship Masters Academy, an online training program for networking that offers the structure and support to put Keith’s bestselling books into action in your life for unparalleled career success and satisfaction. Go here to learn more!

How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 4

“The drops of rain make a hole in the stone not by violence but by oft falling.” – Lucretius

Do you want to stand out from the crowd? Then follow up.

The fact is, most people don’t follow up very well, if at all. Good follow-up alone elevates you above 95 percent of your peers. The follow-up is the hammer and nails of your networking tool kit. In fact, FOLLOW-UP IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS IN ANY FIELD.

Making sure a new acquaintance retains your name (and the favorable impression you’ve created) is a process you should set in motion right after you’ve met someone.

Why go to all the trouble of meeting new people if you’re not going to work on making them a part of your life? Give yourself between twelve and twenty-four hours after you meet someone to follow up. If you meet somebody on a plane, send them an e-mail later that day. If you meet somebody over cocktails, send them an e-mail the next morning.

Some tips for flawless follow-up:

Put the name and e-mail address of a new acquaintance in your database and program your calendar to remind you in a month’s time to drop the person another e-mail, just to keep in touch.

Remember—and this is critical—your follow up shouldn’t remind them of what they can do for you. It’s about what you might be able to do for them. It’s about giving them a reason to want to follow up.

Always express your gratitude.

Be sure to include an item of interest from your meeting or conversation—a joke or a shared moment of humor.

Reaffirm whatever commitments you both made—going both ways.

Be brief and to the point.

Always address the thank-you note to the person by name.

Use e-mail and snail mail. The combination adds a personalized touch.

Timeliness is key. Send them as soon as possible after the meeting or interview.

Many people wait until the holidays to say thank you or reach out. Why wait? Your follow-ups will be timelier, more appropriate, and certainly better remembered.

Don’t forget to follow up with those who have acted as the go between for you and someone else. Let the original referrer know how the conversation went, and express your appreciation for their help.

Make follow-up a habit. Make it automatic. When you do, the days of struggling to remember people’s names—and of other people struggling to remember yours—will be a thing of the past.

Read the rest of today’s mystery posts here

0 How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 5

Bob Burg

How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 5

First, let’s define “Top of the Funnel.” These are people who, while perhaps qualify as prospects they are little more than that. In other words, while they now “know” you, the “like and trust” part of the “know, like and trust” equation is not yet there. Nor, is the need, want or desire for your product or service. Thus, they are at the “top”…the starting point.

The more people at the top of the funnel, the more will likely work their way down into actually becoming prospects and/or referral sources. This, of course, assumes you are correctly building the relationships.

This is why, when people ask, “which is more important, quantity or quality?” I generally answer, “it’s not an either/or, but a both. However, the key is the focus. Since high-*quality* relationships lead to direct business and referrals, focusing on quality over quantity results in an even greater quantity of quality.”

Fortunately, whether in-person or via the various social media, it’s easy to begin the process. In a sense, it’s about identifying the right people (or having them identify you!), meeting (connecting with) them, and building the relationship.

So, in-person? Your local Chamber event, BNI chapter, charity function, etc. Ask questions focused 100% on them; make them feel good about themselves: “How did you get started?” “What do you enjoy most about what you do?”

Online via blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter? Engage them with value. Comment on something in their bio, post or tweet. Ask questions about them. Connect them with others (only with permission, of course), etc.

The best of all is through a referral. Usually, referrals begin already much closer to the sales point, but not always. Sometimes they come in at the top, as well.

Regardless, the key is, at the very moment you “meet’ them, communicate value; no, not in your products or services, but as a person. It’s as simple as that. And, best not to make it any more difficult.

Read the rest of today’s mystery posts here

0 How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 6

Joseph Jaffe

How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 6

Want more leads for the top of your funnel? Then perhaps you want to take a step back and think about WHY you needed those leads in the first place. Did you not have enough customers to begin with? Or perhaps you just didn’t convince them to spend enough….keep coming back for more….and tell others about it. Or perhaps you just lost them – through poor customer experience, service or support, or just plain apathy (being forgotten)

Unless you’re a new business without a very short track record, getting new leads is really not your problem at all. Your real problem is churn. Attrition. You lose customers and try and constantly try and replace them with new blood. You are addicted to acquisition as you cast out that wide net, which just happens to be full of holes.
And you’re not alone.

But what would happen if, instead of ending with the sales conversation; the new customer, you began with the customer purchase? What would happen if you focused on the 20% of your customers responsible for 80% of your revenue? What would happen if you rewarded and recognized your lifeblood instead of wooing imperfect strangers or first time buyers with a slew of deals, discounts , special offers and/or coupons?

Would they pay it forward in return?

If Community 1.0 and 2.0 were the buzzwords of the original digital and more recent social media waves, then advocacy is going to be the next wave that crests and breaks on the shores of marketing engagement and innovation. Using existing customers to gain new ones by proving that retention is the new acquisition is a whole new paradigm that goes back to the future in order to demonstrate that word-of-mouth is most influential and credible when it comes from the hearts and minds of actual customers.

This is ultimately how a small, growing or even larger business can grow its revenue, customer and content base from the inside out by adding new leads to the traditional funnel without necessarily having to sacrifice any on the back end.

It’s good business sense. It’s common sense. And it’s a surefire way to add substantial dollars and cents to your top line growth and bottom line profitability.

Read the rest of today’s mystery posts here

4 5 Ways to Make Your Business Easier to Recommend

This post is a special Make a Referral Week guest post featuring education on the subject of referrals and word of mouth marketing and making 1000 referrals to 1000 small businesses – check it out at Make a Referral Week 2010

If I were to ask you what the secret was to getting someone to recommend and refer your business, what would you say? Perhaps you might focus on the experience that you provide. Or you might believe that this is a behaviour that you should focus on illiciting from only your best customers. Now what if I told you that the single biggest reason someone chooses whether or not to refer your business has very little to do with their experience with you? That seems counter intuitive. Yet if this were false, then everyone who had a positive experience would share it with someone else. And everyone who had a negative one would do the same.

The point is, people don’t inherently share positive or negative experiences – they need an incentive to do it. The main problem is that anger or frustration IS an incentive. That’s why you hear the often repeated adage that it is much easier to get a customer to post a negative review than it is to post a positive one. Satisfaction, apparently, is not as powerful of a motivator as dissatisfaction. Yet despite this behaviour, there are ways to stack the odds in your favor. You probably already know that online opinions make a difference for your business. So the question you need to ask yourself (especially for Referral Week) is how you can make YOUR business easier for someone to share with a friend, family member or colleague. In other words, you need to be easier to recommend!

Here are 5 tips you should consider to help you achieve that:

Ask at the right moment. There is one moment when your customer is likely to be happiest of all, and that is the moment right after they buy something. The decision has been made, and anticipation is likely to follow. Why not ask them to share their experience with a friend right in that moment? Use a post-purchase survey online or encourage your customer to write a review or even take some extra business cards with them as they walk out of your retail location. The more you can do to get someone to recommend your business right after purchase, the more referrals you can generate.

Create different levels. It is tempting to think of recommendations and referrals in strict terms. Say online review, and your mind probably goes straight to the sort of review you might find on Amazon or TripAdvisor. In reality, there are many different levels of engagement when it comes to online reviews, and hand written experiences are the most extreme. A much simpler style is what you may have seen on Facebook … the simple thumbs up or thumbs down. Star ratings are another easy method. The lesson is simple … to create more likely situations where people will share their opinion, try to accommodate for different levels of effort and complexity.

Let them save your details. The magnet for your fridge that your real estate agent always gives you is the prime example of this idea. The opposing idea to #1, the philosophy behind letting your customers save your details easily is that you want to be there in the moment when they do get asked by someone to refer a business or service. Aside from fridge magnets, for the growing digital savvy customer, another way you may be able to stand out is to always include important keywords in your email communications (and always send email receipts). Then your customer can search their email account and even if they don’t remember your business name or have your card handy, you’re just a simple email search away.

Have a personality. The basic fact is that people don’t generally remember businesses, they remember other people. For this reason, having a personality is of paramount importance. When you can foster a personal connections with your business, you give them a reason to remember and recommend you to others. This is the power of word of mouth referrals, that we will remember working with someone who we respected and will be more likely to actively recommend that person and their business in any relevant situation.

Admit failure. This last tip will seem like an odd addition to the list. After all, we are generally taught to hide (or at least never admit) our failures for fear that it may make us or our businesses appear vulnerable. The surprising fact is that admitting a mistake can be one of the unintentionally best ways to humanize your business. We all make mistakes, but how you deal with them is the real question. Nothing can endear your business more to a customer than making a mistake an going overboard to correct it (and not making the same mistake again, of course). So the next time you or one of your employees makes a mistake, own up to it and actively fix it. You may find that in the process you converted an unhappy customer into a brand evangelist for life.

Rohit Bhargava is a founding member of the 360 Digital Influence group at Ogilvy and author of the award winning new marketing book Personality Not Included, an entertaining and useful guide for companies on how to use their personality to stand out. He is also a popular keynote speaker on marketing and business strategy and believes in being approachable

1 2 Next »

Tag Archives for " Rohit Bhargava "

How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 1

How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 2

How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 3

How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 4

How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 5

How Do I Get More Leads in the Top of the Funnel 6