Business Coaching

Facebook marketing can bring great results.

If Facebook marketing has you lost, keep these two facts in mind: the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is 35- to 54-year-olds, and the next fastest-growing demographic is the over-55 crowd.

This is great news for people who are trying to market themselves to potential clients – business owners are in these two age groups, and they’re actively using Facebook.

Now that you know that there are potential clients out there on Facebook, here is an easy way to market yourself and your business:

1) Create a Facebook page for your business
2) Share an interesting article on your page to engage your fans, comment on posts on your page to communicate with your fans, update your page to generate a story about it in your fans’ news feeds, create a discussion section on your page to interact directly with fans, create or join a group related to your industry to find more fans and/or create an event related to your business to meet fans.

As long as you maintain and continually update your page, slowly but surely, you’ll gain fans, interact with people who comment on your events you post on your page, and work up to interacting in person.

That’s the end result…but it takes work to get there.

That seems to be where people fall off the Facebook marketing train. They think it will be easier marketing themselves on social media sites. But in reality, it takes just as much work to maintain and update a Facebook page and interact with fans and friends. As long as you keep this in mind, you should be successful in Facebook marketing.

For other marketing strategies for your business, consider a free business coaching session. It’s a great way to figure out what issues in your business might deserve the most focus.

The "badly drawn" whale that started it all.

A while back, My Business magazine published a story about three high school friends who, for the hell of it, put a short animated film with badly drawn animal characters on YouTube. This short film has turned into a brand and has sold millions of dollars worth of product.

How did that happen?

They did something they were interested in – making a film, albeit short and animated – and created a following. With their following, which proved to be loyal, as they followed the Whale and “Beached Az,” the name of the film, from YouTube to a TV channel and associated products that fans will want to buy.

The animal characters appeal to kids, the subject matter appealed to both kids and adults (a lot of “Beached Az” makes fun of the Australian and New Zealand rivalry), so mugs, T-shirts, ringtones and iPhone apps have been sold all around the world.

Just about anyone can become a YouTube sensation overnight – we’ve all seen that – but to create a profitable business from it? Quite extraordinary.

UK is struggling through some tough times, but that still shouldn’t mean consumers should be helping companies with their marketing efforts.

Mediabistro.com obtained a real open letter “to all of advertising and marketing” from a consumer in the UK. Read how he feels about ads that ask him to work even more than he already does.

As a business owner, can you use the feedback from this letter to help your own business’ advertising and marketing efforts?

Want to try your hand at video marketing? OpenForum.com suggests making a video that provides intrinsic value.

Customers need to know why they should watch your video, why it’s important, and what’s in it for them. How do you show all these things in your video? Try showing it in these four forms:

Inspiration: To bring to light inspiring stories of courage and bravery.

Enlightenment: These are documentaries similar to what you’d see on PBS or the Discovery Channel. Example: Worse Than War, a documentary you can find on YouTube about genocides.

Entertainment: Some videos are plain and simple guffawing funny. Example: the Evian Roller Babies that people have watched twenty-seven million times.

Education: Educational videos show how to do things and use products. Example: how to fold a t-shirt in two seconds.

For more tips on how to make videos for your consumers, read the full article here.

Several sources, including the media, which produces print news, have been crying that print is dying for a while now. But…are they really sure?

Folio Magazine ran an interesting column by Joe Pulizzi, a content marketing strategist and co-author of Get Content Get Customers, called “the Handbook for Content Marketing” by McGraw-Hill, where he says that print, because it is so scarce, is actually an untapped source for marketing.

And his points ring true. For example, Pulizzi says with the increase in junk email and decrease in physical mail, a custom print publication to your target market stands out. There’s just less mail, so more attention is paid to each piece.

Another great point is that, in a way, what’s old is new again. Social media, online content and iPad applications are all part of the marketing mix today. Still, what excites marketers and media buyers is what isn’t being done.  They want to do something different…something new. It’s hard to believe, but I’ve heard many marketers talk about leveraging print as something new in their marketing mix.

So, apparently, if you want to think outside the box…think print.

To read the whole column, click here.

What's the difference between succeeding and not failing?

What is success? Is it just not failing?

It’s more than that, really. Not failing is really just breaking even, because not failing is just about the same as just scraping by.

How does that feel? Probably not the best…but at least you’re still in business.

The difference between succeeding and not failing ultimately comes down to no margin of uncertainty. As a small business owner, you decide which will happen.

When we fail at something, whatever it is, life is teaching us a lesson. What’s the difference between those who are successful in life and those who are not? The successful ones learn from their failures and follow those lessons, while the losers end up doing the exact same thing, or nothing at all, and most importantly, not learning from their mistakes when they failed.

In the business world, it’s exactly the same. Those who succeed will do things using what they’ve learned in all of their past failures. Those who don’t succeed but who just “not fail,” will  The trick is to try something out, and if it doesn’t work, understand why and then do it again with that information in mind to make it work for you.

What does it mean to you readers to succeed and to just not fail? What’s the difference between the two? Business owners: in your business, what carries you over from just “not failing” to success?

Yes...that's a beer in a squirrel. A dead squirrel.

Next time you find roadkill, you’ll be looking at a marketing idea from a Scottish craft brewery.

Scottish craft brewery BrewDog produced a beer with 55 percent alcohol called “The End of History.” But that’s not its highest selling point, according to BrewDog —  this beer comes packaged inside a taxidermic rodent. At £500/$760 per beer, and from photos of the product, at least it’s not just roadkill wrapped around a cheap beer.

What BrewDog did was take an “out there” idea, and combined it with an in-demand product — a beer with a high alcoholic percentage. Combining two otherwise completely separate businesses and products might not normally work — such as beer and taxidermy — unless it’s very well-thought out and marketed well.

Oh, and in case you were wondering: the first batch of the beer served in dead rodents sold out on its first day on the market.

Can you think of any other small business that has combined a highly unusual product with its own to test and measure how that effects sales? Why do you think this idea was so successful?

The iPhone 4 still has unresolved issues.

In the wake of  Apple’s press conference and all sorts of issues with the new iPhone that are making people unhappy, Apple unveiled details of its bumper/case-giveaway program today while at the same time announcing that there will be further delays on the availability of the white iPhone 4.

“White models of Apple’s new iPhone have continued to be more challenging to manufacture than we originally expected, and as a result they will not be available until later this year,” Apple said in a statement. “The availability of the more popular iPhone 4 black models is not affected.”

Why the white model is more challenging to produce than the black version was not explained.

But to deal with the antenna issues now, Apple is giving customers who already bought an iPhone 4 a “bumper,” or phone case. The cases ship in 3 to 5 weeks once customers request one.

Here’s how to get one: download an iPhone 4 Case Program app from the App Store and launch the app on your phone using your iTunes Store account or Apple ID. You then select your bumper or case. Apple will check the serial number to verify you have an iPhone 4.

In addition to Apple’s own bumpers, you can choose cases from Incase, Belkin, Griffin and Speck.

For iPhone 4 purchases made before July 23, you must apply no later than August 22; otherwise customers must apply within 30 days of your iPhone 4 purchase. To qualify for the program, customers must purchase an iPhone 4 by September 30, 2010.

For those who’ve already bought a bumper from Apple, they’re eligible for a full refund including taxes and shipping fees. If the bumper was bought by credit card, Apple says it’s already refunded the account, though it may take a full billing cycle for the refund to appear. If you paid cash, check or used a gift card at an Apple Retail Store, you must return to the store with your receipt by Sept 30.

As announced on its earnings call earlier last week, Apple expects the bumper/case giveaway program to cost the company about $175 million.

Anyone think these antenna issues are going to cause iPhone users enough of a hassle to get them to stop being a faithful Apple customer?

Can MySpace make a comeback?

MySpace has been considered dead for a while now among the social media-savvy. But could MySpace make a comeback?

Five years ago, News Corp. acquired MySpace for $580 million…and then the losses came. Although MySpace Music is listed as the number one music site from comScore, it’s had a steady decrease in popularity since News Corp. has owned the site.

News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said, “We’ve got to admit that during the last two or three years, I think we made some big mistakes. But we’ve got fine new management now; they’ve started to introducing new features. There’ll be a lot of changes coming through the summer. The early indications—and they’re only early indications—are we’re getting more visitors and they’re staying longer. When that gets more substantial, we’ll get more advertising.”

News Corp. has also called MySpace a “work in progress,” as it plays with its number one music platform ranking to try to get back on top of the social media scene, and plans to roll out a number of enhancements to the site in the next few sites.

What do you think? Can MySpace regain its status in the social media site scene?

Any business owner would agree, it takes a lot of strength to admit to the world that a product or service has been dissatisfying to the customer. It’s a bit of a blow to the owner’s ego, and not only that, but it could be detrimental to the business.

But Domino’s Pizza has shown how admitting its own faults can benefit the business…as long as it’s spun the right way.

Domino’s Pizza recently started a huge campaign where it admitted that many people across America were not fans of their pizza. From showing hidden footage shot in focus groups and feedback from customers, Domino’s Pizza was outing themselves as a sub-par pizza company.

But with this campaign, they’re advertising that they’ve changed their pizza recipe for the better. They admit their old pizza was bad, their new pizza is good, and they’re catching people’s reactions on camera.

This is a clever way to take a negative and make it a positive, but it’s risky — after admitting their old pizza was bad in national ads, there’s no taking it back. And if Domino’s new pizza wasn’t an improvement, it was a failed ad campaign.

In business coaching, coaches often have to work with clients through difficult situations — like customers not liking a company’s main product — and help turn them into positive situations, or situations that create profit, as in Domino’s case.

The plus of a risky campaign like this? It’s hard to make fun of the company and actually offend them because, well, they’re insulting themselves. Take the above clip from the Colbert Report. Domino’s has to agree that every word Colbert said is true, which sums up the message of the entire campaign: their old pizza was bad, but they’ve learned from their mistake…and the new pizza is heaps better.