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Outbound Marketing-has the ship sailed?

By Bryce Raley on June 4, 2010

Want to run a TV ad, a radio spot, a print ad, send a direct mail piece or conduct a telemarketing campaign?

Go ahead, I’ll tune you out but maybe some other demographics will still tune in. You can hope people are paying attention. Then you can hope the people that are paying attention need what you do or sell. Then you can hope the people paying attention, who need what you do or sell, pick you over somebody else.

You’re going against the grain though:

Tivo, DVR, Hulu, Netflix, minimalists canceling cable or TV altogether, people playing video games instead of watching TV, poor TV ratings, diffusion with 8 million niche cable channels, Itunes, Podcasts, Pandora, Satellite radio, radio stations already boring you with too many commercials, newspaper circulations down, newspapers and magazines going out of business, this thing called Google, people tossing junk mail, people not opening mail, high postage costs, mail delivery being downsized, automated answering systems, caller id, no home phone lines, gatekeepers who are just as busy as the decision makers, information overload, clutter, clutter and more clutter and did I mention people are busy and don’t want to be interrupted.

If you’re just another “me too” business, then I guess you can just keep doing the same old thing until it’s beyond frustrating and beyond budget. Or you could try inbound marketing?

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Categories: Inbound Marketing

4 things your small business should blog about

By Bryce Raley on June 2, 2010

At Simplified Solutions, we help people tell their stories online and we use tools like WordPress and Twitter. One of my graphic design buddies gave me the title Chief Storyteller (obviously hacked from Chief Shoe-giver ala Tom’s shoes) when he was designing my latest business card. The title stuck and leads to a grin whenever someone sees it

We get the pleasure of telling the stories of some amazing businesses each and every day. A friend of mine Ron Stuart coined the phrase embedded reporter and it really does communicate what we do. We use new media to assist small businesses who have primarily used word of mouth to grow their businesses. Inbound marketing works well for word of mouth businesses, but not so well for those accustomed to interruption based outbound media. When those businesses use new media it often reminds me of Seth Godin’s book, Meatball Sundae. Your company needs to be built or changed to work with new media. When you simply put new media on top of an old business model you get whip cream and cherries on top of meatballs. Not too appetizing and a waste of money.

So when we do our embedded reporting, what exactly do “we” communicate:

(“we” is a team approach and collaborative effort- not just ghost blogging)

We write about their story and their uniqueness. If they are just another “me too business” there is not much we can do to spread a boring story.
We write about keywords that customers may use to find them on Google. We do it in a genuine way. We want to fish where the fish are. If we have what they are looking for, then we want to be johnny on the spot.
We do educational marketing. We ask the sales team, the estimators, the marketing folks and the owner; what don’t prospects understand about your service, your process or your product? Then we craft content that educates.
We have fun. We write about fun things. We mix it up a bit. You should too. Humor is powerful. Part of that fun is staging contests, promotions and creating engagement with customers, employees and raving fans of course.

The goal of it all is to make it easy for their product, service, or story to spread. We set up the platforms and (“in praise of slow” via Mitch Joel) create fertile ground for a community to build. This is all pretty new stuff so check back for updates and case studies. It’s part art, part science and part hope into the future. It’s better than hoping into the past though- pretty sure the old stuff isn’t coming back anytime soon. Thinking along the same lines? Contact us to start the conversation.

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