How To Design Your Website When Marketing Your Business

How To Grow Your Business Online

How To Build Your Brand Online

Social Media Marketing Campaigns That Work

If you've read my post 'But They Like Pies..' you'll understand where I'm coming from here. If not, I suggest you take a couple of minutes to read the post and then head back here when you have the time.

Go on!

Okay, here goes;

The two important things Frank understood about marketing campaigns were who his customers were and what his customers wanted. Sounds simple. It is if those customers are right in front of you like Frank's were in their thousands every Saturday afternoon. He had a captive audience right..?

But you don't, right..?

So you have to understand how to target your customers and how to run an effective marketing campaign to attract those customers to view your product or service. Simple..? Not so.

This is the part most people never get and never will. You've only got to spend a few minutes on facebook or Myspace these days and you'll see every other networker selling their perfect lead generating systema and telling you how they know this will work because they spent thousands of dollars and learned the hard way..blah..blah..blah! Turn the record (showing my age here) over!

I recently carried out a very simple marketing campaign on facebook to illustrate this point. If you haven't seen what I did go to the facebook group LET'S TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN..!!!
Here's a brief outline for you to reinforce the strategy loud and clear. I hope this will give you a few ideas for your own campaigns.

LET'S TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN..!!! was put together to target a specific customer looking to make a fast few dollars without too much effort. The reason I targetted this niche was product based. The product was a second division social media site put together to try to steal some of the MySpace and Facebook market share. The site was never going to compete in my opinion so there was no point in me trying to market the product as superior (great functionality, fantastic groups etc etc). what the site had was a three dollar gift to anyone referring friends. A bribe so to speak.

So the campaign was simple;

1. Target customers looking to smash and grab..(Join, tell a few friends to join, make a few hundred dollars in the process and never use the site again.) By the way, the site had FREE sign up and took less than five minutes to enrol so was perfect for this campaign.

2. Teach these customers a simple step by step duplicatable system to follow and get them to pass on the same information to their friends (and do this fast as like most facebook users they were likely to join the group and never come back). I did this with ten simple topics posted on the groups discussion board.

3. Profile the group to make this strategy clear to all. I decided NOT to promote the site at all (even though I would ultimately benefit from anyone signing up beneath me or my enrollees). Visit the group to see how I do this if you haven't already done so.

4. Use facebooks viral marketing platform to market this to a large audience.

Why do this..?

The long term strategy!

The long term strategy here was two-fold;

First, I wanted to see who would follow the simple system I had set up in the group. Who was teachable in short and who wanted to work with me. I decided rather than chase people to work with me on a project with real value and one where I would be investing a lot of time to offer a no risk, simple system which anyone could follow for FREE with a small investment of time and effort. I guided the whole process, produced scripts, action plans and ten very simple steps which I posted within the group to show people how to promote this opportunity at no cost or risk to themselves. I gave them quite a few tools to build a business online in a matter of minutes and then sat back to see who would take them from the bag. And a few did. And many more didn't as you'd expect.

Second, and more importantly, I wanted to see what movement we could get from one social media site to another. Why? because of the long term plan to move customers to ZenZuu (a new social media site which combines facebook, MySpace and some elements of E-Bay all under one roof). I'll talk more about ZenZuu in a later post but for now take it that the site is worthwhile and I needed a strategy to promote it and move socialisers across the web 2.0 pass.

Marketing is as old as Adam and you only have to look in the big book to see that telling someone to do something is the worst possible approach. Tell them to do the opposite and you'll get results; Eve taking the apple, Pandora's box, the list goes on ..wet paint! don't touch!

So, I used a very simple marketing approach within the group LET'S TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN...!!! to move people across to the site by telling them not to go there, in fact don't even follow my link to the site, follow your friend's link and then take the money and run..don't hang around!

Did it work..? what do you think.

But for ZenZuu I needed a different strategy, a long term strategy to take people there, convince them of the value and keep them there for the long haul. So, I needed them to trust me, to understand that what I would show them would have value and that I had the knowledge to be able to teach them how to attract their own followers to the site.

How did I do this..?

You'll have to drop back in to find that out when the campaign us well under way.

The Story Of Peter And Paul

Take a quick look around the vast social media landscape taking over the internet right now and you could soon start to feel just a little bit dizzy. Nineties style internet marketing approaches such as email marketing, hit and run sales strategies and mass market vampire marketing campaigns are thankfully long gone.

But there's a new ugly and equally off putting monster emerging on the horizon and if you've been on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or Squidoo for a little while you're sure to have come across it at least once already, maybe a thousand times if we're being honest here..

It's what some misinformed networkers seem to believe is successful duplication in network marketing but it's far from it. It's bad replication at best. At worst it's like the return of the dead..

You know what I'm talking about..

Some guy posts a video or sets up a facebook group claiming they can show you how to produce thirty or forty leads per day for your internet marketing system and how they know what it's like to be struggling in MLM because they struggled, in fact they spent thousands of dollars until finally they came across this unique system and now they want to share it with you because they really do care about you and if you just put your name in the form right there at the ..blah..blah..blah

Mike Dillard, Ann Sieg, Randy Gage, the list goes on and the one thing these guys all have in common is their ability to be original. So don't try to replicate them but duplicate what they do.
Still not convinced? Okay, well before you follow in the monster's footsteps maybe you should hear the story of Peter and Paul...

Peter and Paul were brothers who I knew when I was a small boy living in Manchester, England. They were twins in fact. Identical twins. They had red hair, pale, spotty skin and bad teeth from drinking far too much coca cola which they bought by the litre using their mother's rent money. They had few friends and spent most of their time together, like the proverbial pees in the pod. Even so, they hated each other. Being brothers, twins, had done nothing to bring them closer to one another. What others disliked about them as a pair, they despised about each other as individuals and they spent their time together trying relentlessly to get the upper hand.

Peter was the elder of the two by just over three minutes and he used this simple truth to lord over his younger brother wherever and whenever he could, insisting that his name came first in the class register despite it's alphabetical disposition and taking his turn before his brother at the rear of the dinner queue, the bus queue and the queue to kiss Kate West for a pound every Friday behind the school bike sheds.

Paul accepted this fate with increasing bitterness until finally one day the bubble burst and all hell broke...

You see, Paul was greedy. He loved his food and could eat like a shire horse all day and everyday. His favourite food was spaghetti bolognese which was one of two choices every Thursday in the school canteen (the other was cheese pie if you can believe that!). The system suited Paul to be behind Peter on Thursdays. Peter hated pasta as most of the kids seemed to do and so by the time it came to Paul you could be certain there was always a large panful of the stuff left to pile up high on his plate.

And that's the way it was most Thursdays for around a year or so. A pile of spaghetti piled around twelve inches high covered with as much processed parmesan cheese as Paul could shake from the plastic container.

Then one Thursday something fairly ugly happened which conveinced me never to pretend to be something that I'm not...

Peter and Paul took their usual place in the dinner queue, waited their turn with as much or as little patience as they could and when they finally arrived at the pasta dishes, full to the top and brimming with bolognese sauce, Peter turned to Paul and handed him a plate. 'Here brother..' he smiled, as the rest of the school turned from their seats to watch..' I'll help you pile it on high'

'Thanks' Paul nodded, a little bewildered 'don't forget the parmesan'

'I won't' Peter smiled again taking hold of what looked like the parmesan dispenser and shaking it all over the top of the pasta, mountains of it, covering the whole of the pasta with a creamy yellow glow, a fine creamy yellow glow...

The brothers took their usual seats at the back of the hall and placed their plates on the table. Peter took a small bite of his cheese pie and then turned to watch as Paul lifted a huge spoonful of pasta and forced it into his mouth, shoveling more and more down towards the back of his throat the way he always did.

Then suddenly..

Paul began to choke, violently, coughing and spluttering like an old man on his death bed. We found out later that Peter had switched the parmesan and replicated the container at home the evening before, filled it with a mixture mouldy cheese, chillies, ground peppers and seven or eight cloves of ground garlic.

The mixture was so strong and repugnant that it caused Paul's body to go into shock and before being taken away to the nearby hospital he had covered most of the schools teaching staff with a splattering of puke and bolognese sauce.

He recovered a couple of days later but left a lesson for every single person in the room that day. Sometimes, what we think looks like parmesan is something completely different.

So, if you're trying to be something that you're not in social media do it in the comfort of your own living room with the pc turned off...

Be yourself. Be unique. Be entertaining. Be honest. Be the best you can be and learn to be even better.

But They Like Pies...

If you're trying to use social media like facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube to grow your business there are two simple marketing truths to keep in mind;

Know your product
Know your customer

It's that simple right...?

So why are so many people making the same mistake over and over again and failing to either know their product or know their customer or if they do they just can't seem to match the two together. Need proof..?

Take a look out there on the web 2.0 horizon and you'll see almost every Tom, Dick and Sally trying to sell their next big thing, the pre launch of some never to be missed, once in a lifetime opportunity or the same online marketing system with the same tired, old script to the same tired bunch of sad and sorry networkers. Come on guys, give me a break and try something different.

If you're marketing a product realise what you have and who wants to buy it, then target that profile of person and make your product precious so they'll come banging down your door to get it. If you're selling lots of different products then maybe they don't all suit the same person, so you might need to look around just a little..

Make your own mind up. .. but before you do I guess I should tell you about an old guy I knew back in the 80's called Frank Ramsbottom (his friends referred to him Rams-Arse in a brotherly kind of way, the way they do in this part of the world).

Frank worked as a printer in a factory in the town and had done so for the last thirty five years, five days a week Monday through to Friday at twelve hours a day and had missed less than a handful of days in all those years. Once, when his daughter was born and the second time when his wife had been taken ill and he had been forced to learn how to cook, clean and iron in the space of three days. Quite an achievement for a man back in those days. (Okay, okay..so maybe we still struggle from time to time).

Frank could teach you anything you wanted to know about printing, he was a tried and tested expert, been there, done that. If you were new, they put you to work with Frank. If you were old, you sent people to work with Frank. It was that simple...

But Frank's passion was a small wooden kiosk huddled beside the main stand at the local soccer ground where he spent his Saturday afternoons. It was no bigger than a garden shed with a currugated tin roof that made a sound like a badly tuned steel drum when the rain fell on it in Winter. Even so, Frank had made it his home since the sixties, painting the walls in the team colours and sticking pictures up of his favourite players over the seasons.

It was unique and Frank had made it that way.

So if you really want to understand product marketing you need to understand what Frank Ramsbottom knew about pies...

In 1984 the club had it's most successful season for almost twenty years. They reached the last eight of the FA Cup, sold a couple of young players into the top flight to raise some much needed cash and when the last game of the campaign arrived they needed a draw to secure promotion to the second division for the first time in the clubs history.

In preparation for the new season in the second division, the club decided to appoint a new marketing manager by the name of Roger Rodriguez if I remember right, who rumour had it had helped Chicago Sting and a couple of other US Indoor League clubs mount a massive media campaign and create a huge and fairly wealthy following of supporters at the height of the indoor league's brief exposure to American sporting life.

Roger arrived at the ground a week or so before the final game of the season and quickly put his stamp on the place; changing the colours of the turnstile gates to match the club strip, installing a new state of the art music system that could be heard right around the stadium for the whole ninety minutes and agreeing a three year contract with a local seafood supplier who agreed to supply the club with pre-packaged prawn sandwiches to replace the traditional offering of meat and potato pies sold by Frank Ramsbottom from the small, wooden kiosk at the side of the main stand throughout the game.

Frank made his point as you would expect a man of his years to do, explaining to Roger that his customers liked pies 'I don't think they'll do prawn sandwiches' Frank stated.
But like a lot of marketing experts, Roger went in his own direction and decided not to listen to the man at the coal face.

When the final game of the season arrived, a crowd of almost 12,000 people descended on the ground, packing themselves in like cattle and singing an array of celebratory chants for the first forty five minutes of the game as the home team took an early lead in the game and looked right on track to secure promotion come the second forty five. When the players and referee left the field for their usual break mid way through the game the crowd descended on Frank's kiosk, queuing ten deep in the cold and shouting, singing and cursing the way soccer supporters tend to do when they're huddled together. Things seemed fine at first, there were a couple of grumbles and a few minor comments and complaints but most of the people handing over the cash took the pre packed prawn sandwiches and said very little.

As the players took to the field for the second half of the game a mighty roar reverberated around the stadium. Things were looking good and the club semmed on track for a lucrative future in the elite second division...

Ten minutes from the end of the game the opposition scored an equalising goal and the crowd went a little quieter. Things began to feel just a little tense.

As the final few minutes ticked away the opposition threw everything they had into the game and the ball seemed stuck in the home teams half of the pitch.

Finally, with only seconds remaining, the opposition scored a winning goal and the referee signalled the end of the game. The club had lost its chance of promotion.

The crowd turned towards the main stand where the club's board of directors, management and newly appointed Marketing Manager Roger Rodriguez were seated and as one began to shout their annoyance, hurling abuse as the players left the pitch with their heads down and the teams coaching staff quickly followed down the narrow tunnel into the main stand. Then suddenly, from nowhere, a pre packed prawn sandwich was thrown across the stand hitting Roger in the face and knocking him back into his narrow wooden seat. More sandwiches followed, some still wrapped in plastic, other's without and some half eaten and wet with saliva.

In minutes the main stand and the area where the directors were seated looked like an East coast shipyard with seafood scattered everywhere you looked and covering anyone that happened to be in the way.

After twenty minutes or so the police were called in to rescue the directors from the main stand and a few minutes later Roger Rodriguez was escorted from the ground and taken to the nearby hospital for treatment to a head injury. He was never seen at the ground again.

When asked for a statement by the police later that evening, Frank Ramsbottom said simply 'But They Like Pies..'

So, if you're using social media to build your business and have a following to work with take a lesson from Frank Ramsbottom. If you're customers like pies don't try to sell them prawn sandwiches.

'Want To Know Something Amazing About This MLM Cat Of Mine?

We have this cat see? She lives with us, like one of the family you understand? We call her MLM and here's why...

MLM landed on our door a couple of years back - the way cats do sometimes. She was a bit rough at the edges and looked like a good meal would be easily lost on her skinny frame. We didn't want a cat. Never wanted a cat (nothing against them but our middle child has allergies and her eyes blow up like Marty Feldman and we've three dogs who like the idea of chasing anything that moves).

So we fed her. Yeh, I know, not the best idea ever but she was hungry.

And we agreed as a family she wouldn't be allowed in the house and would make a bed for her in the shed if she wanted it.

But, as cats do, she didn't see it the same way and spent the first couple of months on the window ledge, looking in when we were eating as a family and tapping on the glass to see if we would open the door and throw her some food. She was just being herself and we liked that so let her stay.

After a while we would leave the window open a little and throw food through it every so often to keep her quiet (she had started to meeow loudly by then and the tapping on the window was almost non stop).

Then one day she made her way in through the window and sat beside us as a family while we ate supper. This was a persistent cat you understand.

So we fed her again. Yeh, I know, not the best idea but she was pretty entertaining to have around and the kids loved her meeowing as we ate.

And we agreed as a family she was only allowed in at meal times and all other times she would be outside.

But as cats do (and great networkers too) she had other ideas. MLM persisted, she made her meeows more amazing and entertaining (she even started to meeow when we were talking as a family at meal times as though she were agreeing or disagreeing) and we were smitten. Smitten with this amazing big MLM kitten if you want to know. She had got through the door and we were hooked!

7.00am this morning and MLM is walking on top of my head to wake me from my slumber beneath the duvet. She wants her breakfast and she's just letting me know. Honest and to the point so I get up and I feed her some fresh salmon from the fridge. I know, not a great idea but this is a long term relationship and you have to make a few sacrifices don't you...?

So, if you're struggling with your network marketing business, or any other home based business in fact, take a few tips from MLM.

Be persistent
Be entertaining
Be amazing
Be focused
Be honest
Be yourself

Follow MLM Cat right here

Neil Ashworth
The NotForProfit Networker