Blog - Bike Lane Business Development

Video Killed the Radio Star!

from HubSpot

File under: Marketing Tools

I’m hoping you got that headline reference. If you didn’t, I’m way more obscure than I ever thought I could be. That was the title of the very first video ever shown on MTV on August 1st, 1981.

Video is a fantastic way for your customers to get to know you and to build authentic relationships with them. Video in your email can be problematic, but you can embed a GIF like I did above with your video content to give people a preview to let them decide if they want to click on it.

Dan Pink does this with a ton of success with his weekly “Pink Cast” newsletter. https://www.danpink.com/pinkcast/

HubSpot has a post to walk you through the process HERE:

Pop-Rocks anyone?

Self Improvement

Pop-Rocks anyone?

from Inc.com

File under: Self Improvement

I know that I have written job descriptions that have specifically required the ‘Ability to multitask’ in the first few bullet points. After reading this it makes me think I had it all wrong. If doing multiple things at once or switching back and forth from project to project lowers my IQ, I need to re-think my approach.

This is my favorite quote from the article:

“For men, multitasking can drop IQ as much as 15 points, essentially turning you into the cognitive equivalent of an 8-year-old. Don’t be surprised when you find yourself stocking up on pop rocks.”

https://www.inc.com/larry-kim/why-multi-tasking-is-killing-your-brain.html

Photo by Wendy Rake on Unsplash

It’s like ‘Cruise Control’ for your marketing.

Marketing Tools

It's like 'Cruise Control' for your marketing.

from Copyblogger

File under: Marketing Tools

Growing your business can be a long ride, and sometimes you need to put it on cruise control. That’s what an autoresponder can help you do. It can put an entire conversation with your audience on autopilot.

Sonia Simone at Copyblogger (@soniasimone) explains that “an autoresponder is just a sequence of email marketing messages that gets sent to subscribers in the order and frequency that you decide.”

This allows you to set a sequence of emails to a client that can help you connect to them. It could: explain more about your product or service, provide a series of “how to’s” for new clients, map out a series of steps for onboarding for a new client, or a countless number of other things to grow your business.

Photo by Alex Iby on Unsplash

Righty or Lefty?

Customer Service

“Are you a righty or a lefty?” The woman at the counter at Dunkin’s Donuts looked at me expectantly. I had never been asked that when I went for coffee, and it threw me a little off guard. “Huh?” “Are you right-handed or left-handed?” “I’m a righty.” She proceeded to arrange the cover of my refill mug so that the opening was facing me when I held the handle in my right hand. This is my favorite “customer service extras” story. One small question, a minor effort, and she guaranteed that I would return to that specific Dunkin’ Donuts the next day. Little things count. This is what we are all trying to do. Get customers to return and spend more. In this case, it had nothing to do with the quality of the coffee, the location, or the price. This was even less convenient for me. I had recently moved offices, and I did not drive by this one on the way to work, but I went out of my way to go there the next day.

Guess what happened the next day?

She didn’t ask if I was righty or lefty. She remembered. I was blown away. I continued to go there daily. I would pass half a dozen coffee shops on the way to work and drove past my office every day to go to this one. A couple of weeks went by, and I went in there in the middle of the day. It was slow, so I had time to ask her, “How do you remember if I’m a righty or a lefty?” “I don’t have to. I only have to remember if you have been here before and if you are a lefty. I don’t get too many refill mugs, and only a few of them are lefties.” This woman managed to win my business for as long as I worked in that office. I haven’t worked there for a long time and was driving by there recently, so I stopped in. She was no longer there or wasn’t working that day. The service was not up to her standards, unfortunately. What can you learn from this?

Little things can be tremendous things.

Look at your business and your customers. Look at every step of their buying process and how they use your product or service. Find ways to add a little more. I’m not talking about value-added services. I’m not suggesting you give more away, that’s actually the last thing I’m saying. Find a way that you can go one more step that doesn’t cost you a dime but adds to the relationship you are creating with your customer. How can you make that experience a little more special? Here is your homework. Shop your own business. How did you use the product? What was the first thing you did with it? How could that be improved? If you need help, have some questions, drop me a line below, or email me at bill@bikelanebd.com. I’ll help, no strings attached.

That’s my “Righty or Lefty?” moment. What’s yours?

Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

Improve Customer Perception by Breaking Down the Fourth Wall

Customer Service

Directing customer service through transparency

There I stood, in naught but a hospital johnny between my boxers and the world at large…for 45 minutes. Picture that, if you will (not the boxers mind you). Now picture one other patient and at least six medical staff walking in and out of the radiology rooms, frequently laughing or talking about the Netflix show they are currently binging.

What would you think if you were in my shoes? That they didn’t seem to care about me? They didn’t seem to have the word “hustle” in their vocabulary? Maybe you had traveled into the “upside-down” of that Netflix show? You would be entirely justified in thinking any of those things. They weren’t true, however. This is where they needed to improve customer perception.

I’ve worked with medical clients, and their biggest problem is customer service, and it can be yours as well. A typical customer complaint is that there seem to be employees, but no one seems willing to help them.

I’ll pull back the curtain a bit on this story to give you the medical staffs’ view of it. I was there to get an Arthrogram and a cortisone injection. This particular hospital requires an MD for the procedure. The MD was running behind. The clinic staff all had reports to be run, paperwork to finish, “work to do” in other words. These are legitimate, important things that need to get done, so the staff was doing it while they waited for the doctor.

Their mistake was not telling me the facts. They left me in limbo.

My perception was that I had inconveniently scheduled my MRI and Arthrogram during their social hour. The reality is that they were going about their business as usual. They were chatting and being good coworkers while they got their work done. A flaw in the medical world is that employees on the front lines NEVER see cash exchange hands. There is no connection between being helpful to customers and how that translates into their paycheck. If your business runs that way, you could face the same dilemma.

How could they have fixed this? It’s simple, really. Talk to me. Update me. Explain to me that the MD is running late and they can’t start without them. Tell me I can have a seat and maybe get me a blanket because a johnny has minimal insulative qualities.

You can change the perception of your customers by doing what Hollywood calls “breaking down the fourth wall.” Explain what is happening behind the scenes.

Here are some tips for doing this:

Do Your Job

The simplest thing is, “Do your job.” Be responsive. If you have a customer that needs something, give it to them, and give it to them quickly.

Greet People

If there will be a delay, you are helping another customer, for example, greet them and tell them you will be right with them. Bonus tip: You are helping “another customer” not “a customer” because they will think, “I’m a customer, why aren’t you helping me?”

All Hands on Deck

Don’t let job roles get in the way. If you are an employee and you see a customer that needs attention or service, talk to them. Ask them what you can do to help. If you can’t help, explain why, and get someone who can. They won’t feel ignored.

Break Down the Fourth Wall

If you cannot help them because something is out of your immediate control, explain it to them. Break down that fourth wall. “I’m sorry the MD is running behind, and we will start the second that he frees up.” “I apologize for the delay; I’m brewing a fresh pot it will be right up.” Don’t leave people in limbo.

I tell people to think of your CUSTOMER as your boss. If you were busy doing work, but you looked like you weren’t and your boss walked by, what would you do? You have a report that is running, and you can’t move forward until it is complete, but you are talking to the person next to you about the latest episode or talking about your vacation, what would you so? Keep going and let your boss think you were wasting time? No. You’d get busy with something. You’d end the conversation, or you would explain to your boss what you were doing. You’d break down the fourth wall.

How to speak your customers’ language. No, I mean literally.

Clear Business Message, Content Writing

Keep language simple to speak your customer's language

What do you think of when you hear terms like these?

Venti
4K LED Curved 3D
3.5 GHz CPU
50 Mbps download/10 Mbps Upload
2.8-liter engine
AKC Norwegian Lundehund
Force majeure
Myocardial Infarction

If you said that they were all scientific names, you are partly right. You might have said they were names made for pretentious brainiacs, some people would agree with you. In literary terms, this is called jargon.

Webster’s Dictionary defines jargon as:

1 : the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group
sports jargon
2 : obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words
an academic essay filled with jargon

Jargon is like a habanero pepper; you should use it sparingly. You should avoid using it in almost all of your communication, in both your written marketing like your website and printed material. It should also be used infrequently when your team speaks to your prospects and customers. If you can, avoid it at all costs.

A masterful example of this is the way Apple first marketed the iPod. Mp3 players were commercially available in the late ’90s. They sold under various memory sizes. If you talked to a salesperson in a store, and you would hear, “this one has x Gb, and that is why it’s expensive.” If you asked what that meant, they would tell you it holds more songs. (That is the first sign of jargon, by the way. If your customers ask “what does that mean” it’s jargon).

In October of 2001, their first ad for the iPod, Apple described it with only five words “1000 songs in your pocket” with no mention of how many gigabytes it had. Five simple words launched a product that took the digital music world by storm.

Electronics experts will tell you there were quality, design, or performance reasons that this happened, but it started because apple spoke to people in terms that were so simple everyone could understand.
Did people avoid buying the iPod because Apple didn’t tell them the technical specs? I don’t think so.

Take a hard look at your product or service and find all the mp3 players in there. What is your marketing saying to people? What are your salespeople saying when they talk to prospects? Get all that mp3 player talk out of there and make it iPod talk. Speak your customer’s language.

There is a time for jargon. As I said, jargon is like habanero, so here is your five-alarm chili recipe. If you are in an industry that sells highly specialized products or services to an audience that is highly fluent in your specificity, then you are forced to use it.

I have a client who manufactures military-grade communication equipment to military contractors and government agencies. Breaking down their marketing message into simple sound bites would indicate that they didn’t know their asses from their elbows to their clients. They are speaking their customers’ language.

That is the lone exception to use jargon. Use it when its absence hurts your credibility. That is a rare case, indeed. You may have people ask for technical details, or highly informed prospects and clients, but most times, simple language will not turn people away.

Jargon does.

p.s. Here are what those terms are:

Venti – a serving of a drink of coffee measuring 20 fluid ounces
4K LED Curved 3D – An ultra High Definition, three-dimensional Television with a curved screen for a more immersive viewing experience
3.5 GHz CPU – A measurement of the speed of a desktop computer
50 Mbps download/10 Mbps Upload – The speed at which data can be downloaded from your cable provider and the speed at which you can upload data to it
2.8-liter engine – The size and relative performance of a car engine
AKC Norwegian Lundehund – A rare dog certified by the American Kennel Club
Force majeure – Legal term meaning an unforeseeable circumstances that prevent someone from fulfilling a contract
Myocardial Infarction – A heart attack

Speak your customers’ language by avoiding jargon

Tomatoes are squishy, First impressions matter.

Customer Service

Squishy tomatoes are a bad first impression

I hated tomatoes as a kid.

I wouldn’t eat them on a salad. I wouldn’t put them on a burger. I wouldn’t eat tomato sauce if it were chunky. Today, I love them, because as an adult my wife seems to have more influence on me than my mother ever did when she tried to coax me with “They are delicious, just try one.” I can’t pin it down, but I think it was the texture when I first looked at the center that just turned me off. I harbor this regret for all of the salsas and bruschettas that I never had a chance to love.

Where am I going with this? Your business is just another tomato that your prospects will make a snap judgment about, regardless of your undeniable impact on Italian food.
How many times this week alone, have you called a business, walked into a coffee shop, or store and been greet with lackluster effort? More than half the time, I imagine. That’s what it is for me.

Assess how your team greets people. All the details about your first impressions are critical. You have one moment to make it successfully. You can turn people off with your very first greeting. There are too many moving parts of the First Impression Moment to cover here so I think it would be helpful to cover some universal ones. Your greeting is significant pre-customer service.

How do you greet your customers/prospects?

Let’s start with the phone. How fast do you pick it up? I would argue that it shouldn’t be more than three rings. If you can’t answer under three rings, then you need to find a way with technology to extend that without annoying phone trees. There are a lot of phone companies or services that can provide you a solution for this. Simple hold music is even better than just a ringing phone or a voicemail. Try an answering service or a virtual assistant.

If voicemail is inevitable, you need to get back to them promptly (I think an hour is excessive, but that is often the standard for a timely call back). Set the expectation on the voicemail, and beat that expectation. Tell callers “We will return your call within the hour” and make it a half-hour.

What do you say?

The actual greeting is vital because it sets up the entire interaction. The exact words will have to be tailored to your business. Say more than you feel comfortable with. Trust me; the normal instinct is to be short. Go one step further than you think you should. Here are my thoughts; always start with “hello (or hi) thanks for calling (business name), this is (your name), how can I help you today?”

Make it fun, make it original, be memorable! The most important thing is that the person calling you (or walking in) needs to know they reached the right place, feel like they matter and that you are willing to do your absolute best to help them.

How do you say it?

The most important part of that greeting is your tone. Tone is the picture that is worth a thousand words to your actual greeting. It reveals to the person who is calling a multitude of things – whether you want to help them, whether you are bored, or harried, or whether you are having a great day. It paints an image in customers’ heads. They “see” you when they talk to you, the same way you picture the radio DJ in your head. You may later say, “that is not how I pictured her,” but you get to set the tone (pun intended) at the outset.

Be energetic, friendly, and clear. I can’t get into voice and diction classes at this point and still keep this post brief, so I would encourage you to look long and hard at the people you have answering your phones in terms of this.

In-person it’s very much the same principle, although there are many other things you need to concern yourself with, especially if you are in retail. The tone and the speed of that initial greeting should be the same.

I know this may sound like customer service 101, and it is, but it’s important. Work with your team on this; reinforce how essential it is.

Don’t let your company be a tomato.

Website “Pepsi-Challenge”

Small Business Marketing, website content

compare your website to your competitor like the pepsi challenge If you’ve read my blog before, you have heard me talk about how important it is to be able to express to your potential customers what you do, and why you are better than your competition. (Check out my post on “What’s your superpower?” for a refresher.)

I want to share with you an exercise that I have done with a couple of my clients.

Go to your website and go to your “about us” page, or your “what we do” page or the equivalent.
Highlight the text and paste it without formatting into a word or text document.
Now do the same thing for your top three competitors.
Go through each of them and take out any specific reference to the name, owner, or any other kind of demographic data that could specifically identify your company or your competitor.
Print them out, and go to your employees (if you have any) and then to people outside of the company. Go to your neighbors, friends, and family.
Ask them which one is you your business.

If they can’t tell, you’ve got some work to do.

It typically will mean one of two things (if not both):

You are using terms that everyone else is using, and they are too general.
You are intentionally general because you don’t want to scare off a potential customer.

These are both mistakes that will hurt your online presence. (If you do this same thing in person, it will have the same effect.)

Let me give you an example. I have a client that is an occupational health department. They have two major competitors in the area. Here are the main parts of two of their websites. (I’ve condensed these down and removed the bullet points and white space so you can better compare the words.) The third competitor’s site was very much the same thing, so I won’t make you read through a third one.

Example A:

Conveniently located in ________, we serve businesses of every size. We have clients representing a broad range of industries including manufacturing, pharmaceutical, retail and the public sector. We also serve people through our OEM Clinic exposed to chemicals/toxic substances or who have experienced on-the-job injuries. These patients are often referred by primary care doctors, lawyers, unions or insurance companies/agencies. Customized plans to meet the unique needs of your company or organization. Urgent Care, Minor lacerations, Contusions, Strains / Sprains, Minor fracture, Eye injuries, Rehabilitation, Physical Therapy, Hand Hardening, Occupational Therapy, Chemical Exposure, Specialty Care, Functional Capacity Evaluations (FCE), Case Management, Disability Management, Independent Medical Exams (IME), Repetitive Stress Injuries, Travel Medicine, Exams and Regulatory Evaluations, Pulmonary function testing, Pre-placement physicals, Drug and alcohol testing, Immunizations/vaccinations, Hearing testing, Medical surveillance (OSHA Required), DOT Exams, Police/fire physicals, Fit for duty exams, Back injury prevention, Annual physicals, Immigration Physicals, Prevention and Assessment Services, Job Analysis, Orthotics/Prosthetics clinic, Ergonomic workstation evaluation, Safety/hazard identification, Corporate wellness,

Example B:

______________ Occupational Health Center is devoted to preventing, evaluating, and managing conditions that are commonly or uniquely experienced by workers exposed to hazards in the workplace. We understand the functional requirements of any given job situation, and help individuals achieve maximum ability. We use our knowledge and considerable experience to effect a successful, timely return to work. __________ Occupational Health Center is dedicated to: A collaborative partnership displaying enhanced communication with our client, A Board Certified Occupational Health Physician led team which provides appropriate care with a return to work focus, Expedient access to the highest caliber of musculoskeletal specialists the region has to offer, from orthopedic surgeons to Spine Center physiatrists, State-of-the-art employee health services that comply with all current regulations _____________ Occupational Health Center is dedicated to helping our clients and their employees stay safe, healthy and productive. Our team has been helping companies like yours address the costs of workers compensation and the indirect costs associated with it for over 15 years.
________ Occupational Health Center offers a comprehensive portfolio of services including, Pre-placement and post injury physical examinations, Fitness for duty evaluations, Injury management, Coordination of health care and referrals to specialists, Work hazard identification, Coordination of post-injury return to work, Workers’ Compensation evaluations and hearing testimony, Immunizations, Medical screening, Dedicated occupational medicine physical therapy center, Hand therapy, Medical surveillance, Federal regulated DOT drug testing, On-site employee health services, Consultation on health-related issues, Injury case management, Spine Center, Hand Center, Physical Therapy

Now, an employee of any of these facilities could spot the differences and know which was theirs. An honest employee would admit that they would not be able to tell the difference if they didn’t work there.

I’m currently working with this client to re-write one of these to find a way to say what they do differently, and more simply so that people not in the industry understand it.

Do yourself a favor. Do this exercise. If someone unfamiliar with your company can tell you the difference clearly and concisely, then you are on the right track. If not, get your notebook out and start working on it. It will put you far ahead of your competition!

Photo by mahfooz cc on Unsplash

Don’t give “Our customers come first” just lip-service

Customer Service, Small Business Marketing

It’s incredible when you go to hear a speaker or watch a Ted talk and think “That is so right! I have been saying that for ages!”

That happened to me last week. I went to Inbound 2018 this year. It was my fifth one, and while this is not a review of the conference, it is a recommendation of watching the Keynote address from the co-founders of Hubspot, Brian Halligan, and Dharmesh Shah.

Hubspot’s core message has always been that people buy differently today than they did before the explosion of the internet. This year they reiterated that with a bit of a twist. They are saying that there is another shift happening, similar to their Inbound Marketing shift when they launched the company.

This is what Brian Halligan said during his presentation:

“Trust in sales and marketing is at an all-time low, it’s about 5% on the trust index…this is a sign of the times, nobody trusts anyone anymore… who do they trust? They trust your customers. That’s the only people they trust these days.”

He continued that word of mouth has become a significant source of leads for new business. To maximize word of mouth, you have to make sure that you are delighting your customers.

As a result, Hubspot has added more tools to help businesses to service and communicate with their existing customers.

Dharmesh talked about the new Customer Code that they introduced as a guideline on how to build your company’s focus on “solving for the customer” and keeping your company genuinely customer service obsessed.

I have sung this song for an awfully long time. My previous sales managers would say that I was paying too much attention to existing customers and not enough time “knocking on doors.” I disagreed then, and I feel a bit of vindication now when a company like Hubspot says the same thing. I felt that my long-term success was based on people “wanting to buy” from me and that customer service was the key.

I won’t re-hash the entire presentation here because I think that you should watch it yourself.

Customer service is critical to marketing a small business in 2018 and beyond. If you need help implementing some of these in your business, we are more than happy to help.

What’s your “Super Power”?

Small Business Marketing

I see it all the time. I’ll ask a small (sometimes medium and large as well) businessperson what they do for their customers. The response comes in several different flavors of ambiguous and usually ends up with “Well, we can really do everything…” in said field.

In small business marketing, that won’t work. You may very well be able to do “everything” but it’s not going to get you to stand apart from the crowd. It doesn’t present any advantage to working with you than any of your competitors. When you do everything, you do nothing.

Allow me to paint you a picture, with the help of one of my favorite kid’s movies in recent years, The Incredibles. In the scene where the villain Syndrome says “When I’m old and I’ve had my fun, I’ll sell my inventions so that everyone can have powers. Everyone can be super! And when everyone’s super… [chuckles evilly] …no one will be.”

It’s just like you and your business. You have some “Super Power”. You have something that sets you apart from your competition. That is what you do for your customers that makes them want to buy from you. You must be able to define your “Super Power” for your prospective customer. Once they decide to purchase from you or work with you, then you can try and do everything. But don’t start with it.

In “business speak” this is called your unique value proposition….but doesn’t “Super Power” sound so much better?

Your homework kids is to come up with your “Super Power”. Feel free to reply with it below!

photo courtesy of blogs.disney.com