Tag: marketing

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5 strategies to start and grow a successful business with only $200

Ha! 2009 was rough. Very. Finished my master’s that year, experienced similar circumstances and implemented a lot of the same strategies, but not the performance-based pricing listed below. As it turns out, it was a terrific idea for a start-up PR business. Congrats, Zach and an excellent read from Entrepreneur.Money

I graduated from college in the worst year for finding a job in recent history: 2009. I had one interview after another, and the one offer I did receive kept getting delayed. I needed to find a job fast or move back home to California from D.C.

Having always been entrepreneurial, and with a passion for marketing, I decided to form a PR firm with only $200, and a whole lot of unknowns and risks. Six years later, Cutler PR is a leading boutique tech PR firm based in New York that has serviced over 70 clients including major adtech, edtech, fintech and consumer tech companies.

Like many entrepreneurs, I was starting a business with little to no capital. While a generous line of credit, a handful of investors or an attractive inheritance can make starting a business easier, it’s possible to start a business with very little funding. But to do so, the sweat equity will be tremendous.

Related: What Makes Startups Succeed When 40 Percent Fail?

Don’t let a limited budget stand in the way of what could be a successful business and rewarding career. Here are five ways first-time entrepreneurs can bootstrap their way to startup success. It will be incredibly difficult, but it can be done.

1. Utilize a personal network.

The most important step in turning an idea into an actual business is to build a customer or user base. For startup companies with no real footing within the industry, that can be particularly difficult. That being the case, entrepreneurs need to turn to their personal networks.

When I started my business, one of the first things I did was contact various people in my network to tell them about what I was doing to see if I could muster my first few clients. I landed three clients initially — one was a company a relative worked for, another was a company I interned at in college and the third was a company a friend introduced me to.

Until we started getting search engine optimization and inbound leads, all of our clients came from word-of-mouth referrals, most of which stemmed from our original clients. Today, more than 40 of our clients can be traced back to our first half dozen clients.

Build a strong client or customer base in the beginning, and business will blossom from there.

2. Be scrappy.

Running a startup requires entrepreneurs to be unbelievably scrappy. First-time business owners don’t always have the money or resources needed to perform certain tasks or hire consultants, freelancers or employees, which means they have to take matters into their own hands. Sometimes that means figuring things out on the fly or just winging it — doing what they can with what they have.

My firm was so bootstrapped in the beginning that I didn’t even want to pay for accounting software — something I lived to regret because my finances were nowhere near as organized as I would have liked them to be. My advice? New entrepreneurs should save where they can, but not be afraid to spend where they need to.

Related: 10 Bootstrapping Tips to Help Turn Your Idea Into a Reality

3. Seek advice.

First-time entrepreneurs should aim to learn from the failures and successes of people who have done what they’re trying to do. Why try to reinvent the wheel? Seek advice from people who have been there, done that.

Articles and books, while helpful, can only tell a person so much about starting and running a business. Seek out entrepreneurs in similar sectors, speak to them and learn firsthand from their experiences.

I did this multiple times with owners of various PR firms. Find seasoned entrepreneurs who are willing to be open and honest about their experiences. Sometimes that can be tricky. The key to doing it is to approach them as an admirer who has something to learn — not competition who wants something to take.

4. Differentiate the offering.

Standing out in a sea of businesses boasting similar offerings can be difficult, which is why entrepreneurs need to strive to differentiate themselves and their products or services from the competition. How can entrepreneurs attract various shareholders to a business with no reputation or track record?

Craft a convincing pitch about what makes the business different from others within the same industry. Entrepreneurs should focus on the value their companies will bring and why consumers, potential clients and investors should take a chance on their businesses over others that may be more established.

5. Be creative (and competitive) with pricing.

One tried-and-true way to differentiate a new business from similar businesses is with pricing. For new business owners who are still trying to establish themselves within the industry, offering performance or quality-based pricing can be a huge incentive for clients or customers.

I was able to sign on clients in the beginning who never would have signed because I was willing to be innovative with my pricing model and structure it based on performance. In other words, they had very little to lose if I didn’t deliver results. As Cutler PR has grown spectacularly before my eyes, I’ve kept the barebones philosophy from the first days — that results, alongside awesome service, are what drive us.

Original article HERE.

Author:

Marketing Entrepreneur, Founder at The Cutler Group
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Picasso and the Napkin or: ‘Be a Consulting Pro, Not a Consulting Ho’

consulting value - picasso drawing

Are you offering free consulting without realizing it?

Upon first reading this, a Silicon Valley episode (spoiler alert!) came to mind. In it, Richard, an entrepreneur, and his team are prospecting for investors and meet one particular group that seems very interested and excited about everything they have to share. A few days later they decline to invest and instead take all the useful information they gleaned from Richard’s team and use it for themselves to develop a saleable product. BTW – the series is extremely funny and highly recommended. It’s just not so hilarious when it happens to us IRL.

The information we gather and learn as professionals is valuable and perhaps the advice below is a little cynical. Unfortunately, more often than not, it also holds true. Read on.

Originally posted on Carol Roth: Tough Love for Business

Please Don’t Ask to Pick My Brain

Cafe workingThe working title of this post was “Be a Consulting Pro, Not a Consulting Ho.” I can argue that consulting might have come before what is generally considered to be the world’s oldest profession. And we are renting our bodies, too – our brains.

Yes, fellow brain-renters, people pay us for our knowledge and expertise. It’s an intangible, but often quite valuable. They pay us for the things we have learned over the years. They pay us so that they can save time, save money, save aggravation, etc.

There is a famous (possibly apocryphal) story about Picasso and the napkin drawing where someone in a café asked him to draw a picture on a napkin. Picasso then asked a large sum of money for something that took him a minute or two to draw. He justified the price by saying it took him 40 years to be able to draw it.

Did you just have an “ah-ha!” moment? I did when I first heard this story.

Honestly, as much of a consulting pro as I am (having worked as a solo consultant, project employee for the mid-tier firms, and full-time employee for three of the former Big Five), I still struggle with this.

I do understand that you want to get clients and, sometimes, it is easy to just give it away. Especially if you really enjoy doing it. Helping people develop business strategies is like eating popcorn for me – I love doing it and I can’t stop myself.

Ways to give it away

If you know you are giving too much away, here are some suggestions:

  • Create an “office hours” time on your calendar and have a way for people to book that time with you or join you on a conference call line or Google Hangout.
  • Develop some kind of assessment offering that is easy for you to do and valuable for your prospect. Give it a special name so it sounds important. Create a few time slots that you dedicate to providing this. Make sure people know that it is a good way for both of you to see if there is a fit for you to work together more.
  • Create a webinar that you give periodically that people can sign up for. This will have reusable content so it won’t take a lot of your time after the first time you give it.

Ways to make them pay

Here are some things to try if you are having trouble saying no.

  • Make people pay a small amount so you weed out the real tire kickers – maybe $15-30 for 15-20 minutes. You can even add this to your services page with a link to book you for that.
  • Create a low-cost webinar so that people are getting good information, but you aren’t spending a lot of one-on-one time. This way, they get used to paying you for your knowledge.

Ways to avoid coffee dates

So, what do you do about the dreaded “can I buy you a cup of coffee” request? Honestly, I mostly try to redirect that to a short 20-minute chat, unless they are a very close friend, possible business partner, referred potential client, or Bradley Cooper.

This sounds snotty, but I lose three hours of my day meeting for coffee between getting ready, getting there, having the meeting, and getting home. You need to be pretty interesting to get me to do that.

You also could direct them to the free ways to work with you mentioned above.

Ways to avoid premature proposals

Consultants start to get excited when a prospect asks for a proposal. We think that means that the prospect is serious, and that they might actually hire us.

Here’s the thing, proposals take time – often a lot of time. And you may give away too many ideas too soon.

To avoid premature proposals, try the following:

  • Get the prospect to clearly articulate their need or exactly which of your services they are interested in to solve which of their problems. Clarity is key here to avoid having to send a second proposal. Also, try to confirm that they have a budget to avoid a giant time suck.
  • Have the prospect complete some sort of detailed intake form or survey or inventory. Making them do something that takes time will weed out some tire kickers. They think their time is valuable, although they may not particularly value your time.

As you can see, there are specific situations where it makes financial sense to give them a quickie, as you have a good chance of acquiring a long-term client.

What should you do with the obvious tire kickers, freebie junkies, and entitled who think they don’t have to pay for your hard-earned knowledge?

I recommend you tell them what I do, “No, you can’t pick my brain.”

Original post is HERE

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12 social media tips for business

Social media marketing tips

Ah, social media. Still the wild west of marketing and populated with a mix of guns for hire and snake oil salesmen who, unfortunately, outnumber the authentic Gary Coopers out there. Sigh. I despise watching businesses that don’t have the time to understand what social can really do for their business get taken advantage of by folks promising more followers and reach.

So what?

How about grow revenue, inquiries, email lists, orders, bookings, downloads? It would seem a novel concept and an expectation to which many snake oil social media consultants don’t wish to be held accountable.

So next time you hear another “social media guru/jedi/ninja/sherpa/ expert,” etc. pitching you all about the awesome new followers, content and reach they can get you on the social platform du jour, step back and ask why that’s important to your business. The beauty of digital marketing is most everything can be tracked, and if your “hired gun” can’t provide analytics to show you what their efforts are specifically doing for your business, well…

The title on this post was modified from the original slightly clickbait-ish hed, 12 Social Media Truths No One Tells You – otherwise the content is the same and I agree with these “truths.” The following thoughts go hand in hand with a previous post, 7 things to quit doing with social marketing. Read on!

 

There’s no shortage of social media tips, how-tos, and advice for small businesses and entrepreneurs getting started and building a strategy. But if you’re like most business owners, you don’t have a lot of time. So here are 12 social media truths I hope can save you some time, avoid some common pitfalls, and focus your efforts on success.

1. It doesn’t matter how many followers you have.

People often fall into the trap of chasing follower numbers (or worse, paying for them). I’d rather have a network of 500 people in my industry who I can learn from and influence than 10,000 randomly-acquired bots and spammers and self-promoting chuckleheads. Build your networks by engaging like a real human being and helping people and you won’t have to worry about this.

2. You don’t have to be on every network.

I love Pinterest. These days I’m pinning ideas to spruce up our back patio. (It’s a thrill a minute ’round our place.) As a former social media snake oil salesman, I can make a convincing argument why any business can get value out of Pinterest or Instagram or Periscope or Glabberplat (I made one of those up). But if you have limited time, focus on providing value on the networks where your customers and prospects are most active. Better to not be somewhere than to have a presence there and ignore it.

3. You know your audience better than anyone. And if you don’t, ask.

You could pay a consultant to do an audience survey and explain the demographics of each social network and make recommendations about what networks you should use and what your customers want to see from you. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of smart consultants out there who can do that well. Or you could just spend the next couple of weeks asking your customers yourself.

4.Yes, your customers are on Facebook.

There’s, like, a billion people on Facebook. No, I mean literally. The number grows so rapidly that I check it every time I mention it. Your customers may not use Facebook daily to conduct business, but they’re definitely there, sharing pictures of their kids and finding out which Game of Thrones character they are and researching products and checking out local businesses. If you’re there too, and are interesting and helpful and human, they’ll appreciate that and remember you.

5. Social media isn’t free.

Have we thoroughly debunked this by now? Even if you only use free channels to engage and don’t pay to promote your posts, social media requires a time commitment, and like everything in life except making hamburger patties, the more time you put into it, the better it will be. Is your time free? Nope.

6. You don’t have to be a millennial.

Yes, “digital natives” have a lower learning curve when it comes to picking up apps and new social networks, but none of this is hard, no matter your age. Can you balance a checkbook? Can you do a Sudoku puzzle? I can’t, and I do social media for a living. Apps and networks won’t get traction if they’re hard to use, so the makers have an incentive to create a good user experience.

7. No, your cousin’s kid can’t do it for you.

Maybe Little Jimmy can build a wicked house in Minecraft, but does he know your business? Your customers? Does he have anything of value to add to a conversation about your industry? He can probably use a telephone, too (as long as it isn’t a pay phone, because how does that thing work and who even has change, gah!) but would you ask him to lead a call with your biggest client?

8. Yes, you do have time.

You’re busy. I’m busy. Everybody’s busy. Do you ever watch television? Then watch a little less and spend that time building your business. Need another example? I’m writing this post on my smartphone on the…train. (What did you think I was going to say?)

9. You can produce content. Yes. You can.

Have you ever sent an email to a business associate giving your take on the impact of some piece of industry news? Do you talk to your sales team about the potential ramifications of a piece of legislation, or a big move by a competitor or industry leader? That’s content. Just type it up next time. Your customers will find it valuable too. Don’t you want to be a thought leader? It’s so much better than being a guru. The hours are better and you don’t have to sit on the ground.

10. A blog post is whatever you say it is.

Some people think a blog post is a 2,000-word white paper. Some of the most useful posts I read are lists of links to important news in my industry. They might take 10 minutes to create, start to finish, but they can be very valuable. One paragraph that gets a customer thinking (and thinking about you) is a successful blog post.

11. Your customers really do care where you went on vacation.

Have you ever had a prickly email or telephone exchange with a new prospect or client, and then you met in person and found out your kids both play volleyball and are going to the same tournament in two weeks and then you were pals? That’s Facebook.

12. You can do it.

Building a social media strategy doesn’t have to be a big, hairy, difficult thing; in fact, it can and should be fun. Imagine having better, more human relationships with your prospects and customers, all the time. Social media can be the part of your marketing strategy you’ll actually enjoy. And if you’re having fun, your customers and prospects will have fun, too, and they’ll want to work with you. And that’s how you’ll know it’s working.

David B. Thomas is Senior Director of Content and Engagement at Salesforce.

 

Original post on VentureBeat

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How to grow your reputation (and business) in competitive fields

Two things. One, I don’t know about the ethics of posting an article from HBR that allows you to read 5 free articles and then has a paywall in place [I ALWAYS link back to OC, but please let me know your thoughts on this – I do appreciate knowing if I’ve pissed somebody off]. I also didn’t like the original title of, Get People to Listen to You When You’re Not Seen as an Expert. It sounds a tad manipulative to me. Two, what I’ve found that really helps in growing any reputation and business is time and honesty. OK, let’s throw reliability in there as well. Now, I’m not saying that good old fashioned networking and self-promotion are a bad thing, but it takes time for people who decide their marketing spend to get to know you. There is also a wrinkle in this field as we fight to convince folks digital is overtaking traditional in the fight for eyeballs. Many of the the decision makers -or, HiPPOs – need to be familiar with your reputation and opinion of your peers before they even agree to hear your pitch, let alone that their traditional efforts may not be working as well as they did in the past. AND, let alone why they should reapportion some of that spend to the digital realm.

And we won’t even go into the difficulties a new graduate, or someone who’s switched careers at any age will experience [This will be definitely be another post, as I’ve experienced both firsthand]. Again, time, honesty and reliability will win out. I cannot stress enough the reliability part. I am regularly surprised by how hard it is to find reliable folks to help with a project in a freelance/consultant (or even salaried) capacity.

That said, I will repost the article that started this thought below, with links to the original article on Harvard Business Review. Enjoy!

Get People to Listen to You When You’re Not Seen as an Expert

Growing a business when your new can be difficult
Being new to your field can be difficult

One of the most powerful forms of influence, according to psychologist Robert Cialdini’s famous analysis, is authority — often derived from perceived expertise. When a doctor advises us to exercise more, or a Nobel Laureate raises questions about a certain economic policy, we’re likely to pay much more attention than if a random person offered the same counsel. In our professional lives, this principle can be a boon: if you have a Ph.D. in a subject, or have worked in the industry for 20 years, or are seen to be an expert because you write for a certain publication, you have an increased ability to influence others.

But what if you don’t have those credentials? As I describe in my new bookStand Out, when you’re just starting out in a field, or lack blue-chip affiliations, it may be hard to persuade others to listen to your ideas, even if they’re groundbreaking and valuable. Here are four strategies to help you overcome your perceived lack of expertise and ensure you can make an impact.

The first step, if you aren’t yet seen as an expert in your own right, is to borrow others’ expertise. If you’re a thoughtful curator of the best ideas in your field, even if you’re not developing them yourself, others will start turning to you for guidance. “Originality can be overrated,” says Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50. He cited Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel Goleman (of Emotional Intelligence fame) as examples of thought leaders who are actually “synthesizers” of information. Says Dearlove, “These guys bring communication skills and an ability to bring complex ideas and make something out of them, but it’s not their [original] research.”

YOU AND YOUR TEAM

Another strategy to gain more influence for your ideas is finding commonality with your audience, a technique that makes them far more receptive to hearing from you. In Stand Out, I profile Robbie Kellman Baxter, a consultant who earned her MBA from Stanford and, as an active alumni volunteer, now derives more than half of her business from her fellow graduates. “The reason it’s good for your business is that you’re able to form genuine relationships with like-minded people very quickly, and to me, that’s the definition of good networking,” she says. “There’s a kind of trust: I know what you went through because I went through it, too.”

It’s also important to be strategic about how and where you’re applying your persuasion techniques. In my previous career as a presidential campaign spokesperson, we frequently created powermaps, which identified who the relevant decision maker was on an issue, who she listened to for advice, and how close we were to those advisers. The goal was to create an “echo chamber” effect, in which – even if we couldn’t reach the target directly – we could ensure she would hear about our position favorably from a variety of sources. Powermapping is a highly targeted form of influence that can enable you to bypass objections about your own level of expertise on the subject.

Finally, the best antidote if you’re lacking an expert reputation now is to start creating one ASAP. Creating original content is the single most effective way to develop an expert reputation. Though the best channel will vary (photographers and chefs should double down on Instagram, while it’s less helpful for attorneys and insurance brokers), blogging is a good bet for most professionals. In just an hour or two a week, you can begin to demonstrate how you think about the issues facing your field and sharing your unique point of view. Your content creation sparks a virtuous circle: because reporters looking for comment almost always start their articles with an online search, if your name keeps coming up as someone writing about the issues, they’re likely to contact you, reinforcing your expert reputation with third-party validation.

If you’re not yet considered an expert, it’s harder to get your ideas noticed — but not impossible. With these strategies, you can begin to overcome others’ resistance and make sure your voice is heard.

Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist and professional speaker who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and Stand Out. You can receive her free Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook or follow her onTwitter.

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