“All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men.” Hilaire Belloc. Your business has escalated tremendously since you have been using social media. The greater your exposure, the more criticism you will receive. What do you do?

You should consider the criticism as an opportunity to do better. In an interesting way, your reputation as a business blogger is similar to the reputation of anyone who has gained some fame (or notoriety). The more content you share and the more people are willing to interact with you, the stronger your celebrity will be. However, along with the adoration comes some opinions that will be contrary to what you are offering. There will be occasions when people disagree with the information that you share in a particular blog post.

What to do with criticism

Criticism isn’t important (well, it is actually very important but it should not be avoided at all costs). What is important is what you do with the criticism and how you use it to improve upon what you offer and on how you conduct business. If a reader offers you constructive criticism on something that you have shared, you may be able to use that information to improve upon what you already have. Perhaps, the other person’s point of view offers some ideas that just never occurred to you before and it is getting you to look at your business in a fresh way.

Criticism can take a toll on you if you don’t approach it in the correct way. If the criticism is destructive, it may affect your self-esteem. It may lower your opinion of yourself and your business efforts. If you go to that place (emotionally), the quality of your work will not be as good as when you have a positive attitude. If your professional performance suffers, you are bound to make mistakes. If you do receive criticism, be as gracious as possible and ask the person who is handing out the criticism to offer you some solutions as well.

Have a reasonable response

As difficult as it is to accept criticism, you need to try to separate your emotions from the message that you are receiving. It is a very good idea to step back before you respond to the critic and say something like “I will consider what you have said. I appreciate the feedback.” If, on the other hand, the criticism does nothing to help improve what you are doing, you are well within your rights to reject it. You are not under any obligation to do everything that everyone tells you to do.  Of course, there are several different types of criticism, some constructive, some destructive, and some from people who love to criticize but don’t really have anything worthwhile to contribute. Those are the critics whom you don’t need to take seriously. The one thing that you really want to avoid is getting so caught up in cycles of criticism that you lose sight of what you are doing and why you are doing it. Stay focused on exactly why you went into business in the first place. Take whatever information and advice that you can from others and discard the rest.

Conclusion

It is important to try to see everything and everyone with whom you are associated for business as an opportunity to learn, grow, and prosper. When you are the recipient of criticism (which everyone in the universe experiences at times), do everything in your power to use it to your advantage and to the advantage of your business. There will definitely be times when you can learn from the critic and turn the advice into gold.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team and don’t forget to “like” our Facebook page.

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1. Leveraging Social Media for Your Offline Business
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You use social media to promote your business and you conduct business in person. Both are important for the success of your business. How do you provide your traditional promotion with a way to access your online promotion?

Even though people do a great deal of business online, there is a lot more that people do offline (or in person). In order to be truly successful in business, you need to find a way to integrate your online business efforts with your in-person business dealings and relationships. So, how do you promote your online business when you are doing traditional business promotion?

• Make business cards that lead people to online events: The information on your business card must be precise and extremely effective at drawing people to you. A great way to bring the business that you conduct in person together with your online efforts is to include a special code and/or Facebook Fan Page, which will give people a discount to events that you have or will organize in the future.
   
• Combine your web presence with traditional advertising: If you are running a traditional advertisement in a newspaper, magazine, etc, you can include your business’s Twitter handle, iPhone App, or Facebook page. You can also include the URL to your website on your advertisement. People nowadays really like to be able to check out your website before they go any further with you.
   
• Combine online features with in-person events: Many companies have been getting together lately as a group and are blogging about each other. All sorts of valuable and informative information can come from this. Another great vehicle is photos or short videos. If your business is having an event, you can film or photograph people using your products and then you can post the photos and/or video on your business’s Facebook Fan Page. The nice thing about that is that people don’t actually have to attend the event in person in order to participate. 
   
• Use your car or truck as a billboard: This is an excellent way to combine online and offline efforts. Numerous business owners recognize how important it is to get involved with social media to increase the exposure of their offerings and reputation.
   
• Be as creative as possible: There are so many ways to offer online information (including ways to reach you) with your traditional advertising. You should make the promotional effort as interesting and as creative as possible. If it is interesting, you will attract more people.

Conclusion

Combining your online and traditional promotion for your business is the most effective approach that you can take when it comes to achieving success for your business. Your objective should be to combine the two in a way that is a dramatic improvement over only using one or the other. Both traditional and online promotion are essential and if done correctly, the two approaches should complement and enhance each other and they should be effective enough to really touch people and make them want to be involved. The initial promotion is just the beginning. Its purpose is to get people interested and wanting more. The next step is for them to continue to pursue information about your business online.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team and don’t forget to “like” our Facebook page.

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As important as social media is to the success of your business, using it, even to its fullest potential, should never be at the expense of traditional media. They must work together to allow your business to flourish properly.

If you are a business person who understands the importance of integrating the two types of media to get maximum results, you are doing all of the correct things for your business. On the other hand, if you are not so sure of that importance, you might ask how you can integrate all of the social media with your traditional marketing and public relations strategy.

The fact is that social media has become an extremely important part of how businesses market their brand and their products. Technology offers so much at this point that marketers are no longer satisfied with only understanding how to use Facebook and Twitter. They now want to understand how to integrate social media with traditional media into their advertising, public relations and direct marketing campaigns. Of course, traditional media carries with it a great deal of credibility and although it may not create the same kind of buzz that social media creates, it is a very important contributor to the success of business. There are subtle ways in which social media and traditional media meet without your having put them together consciously. For example, anytime you have your business’s logo on an online advertisement for your business, you are seeing that coupling.

In order to succeed with this approach, your mind needs to wrap itself around coming up with ways of thinking about integrating social media, traditional media, and digital media. It is more about the framework than it is about the process. If someone builds you the framework for using social and traditional media for the full advantage of your business, you can apply that over and over again. Once you have the established structure, you will be able to do it on your own as many times as you need to.

• Truth: It is a known fact that consumers trust the opinions and recommendations of other consumers much more than they trust the business owners. That is the main reason why social media produces such successful results for businesses. People speak to each other. The trust that consumers have for business owners takes time but it will happen eventually.
   
• Yin and yang: If you were to imagine any symbol when it comes to the integration of social and traditional media, the symbol that expresses the relationship most clearly is yin and yang. The two parts (or types of media in this case) can exist separately. However, in order to truly work as a complete concept, the need to work together. Together, they complete the picture.
   
• Mutual benefit: When you use social and traditional media together, they feed off of each other and are mutually beneficial. Together, they create a much stronger and much more effective and successful marketing campaign. They complement each other so well and each makes up for whatever is lacking. They complete each other.

There are several points that you need to ponder before you, as a business owner, build your social and traditional integration framework and start to work with the two forms of media. The questions are:

• Your goals: What is your business goal and what is your communications goal?
   
• Who is your target market? Before you start, you need to be very sure who your target market is. It is recommended that you don’t only concentrate on demographics. If possible, try to identify with your target market on a more personal level. Try to find out what they look like, how they sound, who their friends are and why they are interested in your product.
   
• Where is your target market? This does not just mean where they are physically. It also refers to what point they are at in their lives. If you can come up with that answer, you will have the ability to connect with your audience on a much more personal and meaningful level.
   
• Connecting with your target market: You need to figure out how to touch them in a way that makes them want to stay connected to you.
   
• Interacting with your target market: Once you have established contact, you need to figure out how to make them stay connected to you. The more you interact with them, the stronger your relationship will become.
   
• Getting your target market to share you with their friends: Once you have established a strong relationship with the members of your target market, they will start to trust you. Once they trust you, they will want to share you and your offerings with people whom they care about. You will see that the success will really start to boom after this has happened.

Conclusion

When you integrate social and traditional media, you are giving a great deal more strength to your campaign than if you had a single-layer marketing campaign. Integrating adds another dimension and you will see that the success of your business critically depends on that integration.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team and don’t forget to “like” our Facebook page.

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1. Is Traditional Advertising Obsolete?
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With the advent of social media and inbound marketing, there seems to be a trend toward online advertising and away from certain types of traditional advertising. There are certain types of advertising that are used less and less lately.

There are many possible reasons for this, among them being cost. Traditional advertising costs money. Lots of money. Inbound marketing, which is a marketing method that brings your customers to you, costs very little, if any, money. With the rapid development of technology, the world of sales, marketing and advertising is being drastically affected. One of the main reasons that certain forms of traditional marketing are fading into the distance is that with traditional marketing, it is very difficult to track the metrics, whereas, with online advertising, it is very easy to track the metrics (with such tools as Google Analytics).

Another sharp contrast between traditional advertising and online advertising is that you are not able to focus your advertising efforts so precisely with traditional advertising. With online advertising, you can pinpoint your specific niche and your specific potential customers and existing customers. You have absolutely no wasted efforts.

If you examine the way in which companies acquired leads a decade ago, you will see that it is very different from the way in which companies acquire leads today. With the competition being as stiff as it is, as a business, you really need to have a hook in order to succeed. Your hook has to be unique and effective and it has to be yours alone. One thing that is for certain is the concept that before you can even entertain the possibility of selling any product or service, you need to work long and hard on interacting with people and with building strong and meaningful business relationships with your business associates.

Modern marketing

Marketing today is very different than the marketing of the past. In traditional marketing, the company that had the money to buy more leads and potential customers won the business. With online marketing, money is not really relevant. What is relevant is time and effort and forming and maintaining relationships that have trust as a foundation and mutual respect.

There are some types of traditional advertising, types that have been in existence for a very long time, that seem to be fading to the background and there is a good possibility that they may become obsolete in the next several years.

• Newspapers: Newspaper advertising has been a time-honored tradition for so long. It is certainly an institution. More and more businesses are no longer using newspapers to advertise their brand and offerings. The idea that a business would have to spend many thousands of dollars on one advertisement that will only appear for one day seems absurd when compared with online advertising.
   
• Local radio: Radio stations, per se, will not disappear. However, the small, local radio stations are struggling more and more to stay afloat. The concept of a local radio station selling a 30- or 60-second advertising spot to a business and that the business must run the spot for 6 months in order to see any positive results seems kind of crazy. Radio advertising is short-term advertising. Considering the extreme effectiveness of online advertising, radio advertising really can’t compare. The reason that inbound marketing is so effective compared with traditional advertising is that with inbound marketing, people can’t do anything to block your advertising methods. In fact, they make conscious decisions to opt in. With traditional advertising, people have gotten very clever. They can block ads at will.
   
• The Yellow Pages: The Yellow Pages is no longer an effective form of advertising, in many cases. Many people receive the Yellow Pages and never give it a second look. Maybe they use it to even out the table legs or the stick it on the bookshelf and it quickly gathers dust. Why would people use the Yellow Pages when it is much faster and easier to search online for the same information? And the print online is so much larger!
   
• Direct mail: Direct mailings find their way into the garbage much more readily than anywhere else in a person’s home. Direct mail is expensive and often, people don’t pay any attention to it.
   
• Home shows: You pay a great deal for a home show. After your business has shelled out so much money, you don’t generally get a good return on investment. Home shows are not all that convenient. Many people prefer to find out about new products, services, etc, online than having to pay an entrance fee to the home show and walk around aimlessly for hours.

Conclusion

As sad as it is to think about, some forms of traditional advertising are truly becoming obsolete. That is not to say that all forms of traditional advertising are dying or that they are not very valuable. In fact, online advertising works most effectively when it is paired with traditional advertising. Online advertising enhances your offerings very effectively and traditional advertising enhances your offerings in other ways. As a business owner, you should not forsake one form of advertising for the other. You should use them for your business as complements of each other.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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Is cold calling becoming obsolete? Do only old-fashioned business people do cold calling? Is cold calling actually effective at increasing business? Many people feel that they have to do cold calling to succeed in business. Social media has changed everything.

What is the definition of cold calling? Cold calling is part of the sales process whereby a sales person gets in touch with prospective customers or clients who were not expecting the call. The word “cold” is used because this interaction is unsolicited. The main point behind the phrase “cold calling” is that it is an attempt to reach someone who doesn’t know you, hasn’t been introduced to you and wasn’t expecting your call. The term “cold” by itself doesn’t necessarily mean “without any knowledge”. With all of the information available via the web, sales people would be remiss if they didn’t learn something about a prospect before they called them. But no matter how much information a sales person learns, if the person doesn’t know the caller, the call is still considered a “cold call.”

The cold calling process has been refined to enable a sales person to hone in on their prospect target market in order to develop a database of prospective customers based on a variety of target criteria, such as company size, type and location. By using sites such as Jigsaw, SaleSpider, Hoovers and LinkedIn, companies are better able to increase the chances of successful cold calls by identifying those prospects who are most interested in what they are selling.

Rather than cold calling becoming obsolete, it is being redefined and enhanced by the proliferation of modern technology and social media.

Cold calling in the traditional sense of the word is becoming more difficult as attempts to reach someone by phone or email are becoming more challenging due to federally maintained do-not-call lists and other obstacles. However, on the positive side, this same use of technology and social media is transforming the entire sales process including cold calling. Sales people no longer have to blindly make calls to their prospects in the hopes of reaching someone and making a connection. Rather, they can learn important information prior to making that first call or sending that first email. The Internet makes it easier to qualify leads and learn more about their needs, history, reputation and any other information that will enable the sales person to make a better connection and start off this relationship-building process from an informed perspective. Modern technology enables sales people to better attract, interact, track and manage their prospects via the Internet.

Traditional cold calling is becoming warmer because of the proliferation of modern technology and the increasing usage of social media. In addition to better qualifying leads, companies are able to use search strategies to drive traffic to their websites, make it easy for visitors to request information about the company and hand off what is now “warm” prospect contact information to their sales people, thereby reducing the need for endless cold calls that lead to dead ends. The volume of cold calls is, therefore, reduced and techniques such as attraction marketing are becoming more prevalent. Attraction marketing is specifically designed to teach prospects about what your company does and how it will benefit them and/or fulfill their needs.

Company websites that have live chat functions serve as another method of qualifying leads and turning cold prospects into warm or hot prospects. Visitors to your website have an interest in what your company offers and live chats create an instant opportunity for sales people to connect with potential customers/ clients.

The sales process of today is one that is enhancing and transforming cold calling by giving sales teams both the tools and the insight to reach out to the right people, at the right time, with the right message. Cold calling still exists; it has simply become more effective as a result of the ease of information gathering via the World Wide Web.

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Having powerful and successful marketing messages for your business is essential for success. Your core marketing messages need to make your potential clients understand that you can solve their problems. This will make them decide to hire you.

As surprising as it is, there are many solo practitioners who don’t put the same kind of effort into their marketing messages. They may have a website built, which explains in great detail how they are able to solve their clients’ problems. Based on their Internet presence, very few people are paying attention to them and they don’t understand why.

You must have a very well-developed and well-defined core marketing message. The core marketing message is the message that you want to get across to your potential customers.

It is the message that will convince your potential customers that you have the answer to their problems. In other words, you have answered the question: What’s in it for them? Your business’s success is totally dependent on your marketing message being extremely clear and effective.

Marketing, whether it is online or traditional, is still marketing. One of the common marketing principles, which is an easy principle to follow, uses the “4 Ps”: price, product, positioning and promotion.

Your Internet marketing strategy is the main principle that you want to bring across, which you have personalized for your potential customers. Just as in traditional marketing, your online marketing campaign must identify the needs of your potential customers. In an Internet marketing campaign, as is the case with a traditional marketing campaign, you will always speak directly with your potential customers.

An important factor that is unique to Internet marketing is privacy. When it comes to the Internet, people are very concerned about their privacy. They need to be able to feel that their information is secure and safe. They need to be able to feel that they can trust you with their information.

Your privacy policy, which will give your customers and potential customers peace of mind, needs to be easily accessible. You should never assume that your customers know about your privacy policy. It is your responsibility to tell them about it.

Introduce yourself

The reason that you are marketing your business in the first place is so that people will choose to hire you. As basic as that concept is, it definitely should never be overlooked. You need to state who you are in your marketing message. All of your marketing materials should have the name of your business on them. You do that so that your potential clients will remember your business’s name, even if they don’t make a commitment to hire you right away.

When you introduce yourself, you should keep it simple. You don’t want to speak about yourself too much because that could distract your potential customers and, in the worst-case scenario, push them away. Your potential customers are much more interested in what you can do for them than who you are.

Identify problems

Another very important factor to focus on in your core marketing message is the actual problem that needs to be solved. It is essential because that is how your marketing messages will touch people. It will make them feel that you can solve their particular problem. They will feel that you are personally taking care of them.

Offer an outcome

After you have been able to identify the problem, you would normally offer a solution and explain the process that you would follow to get to that solution. However, what people with problems really want is for you to offer them a positive outcome. You need to make your potential customers understand exactly why they need you. It is essential for you to identify specific outcomes. You must learn what your potential clients want to get out of the situation, figure out if you are able to provide it for them and offer it to them.

You need to take each of the problems that you have previously identified and incorporate them into your core marketing message. With each problem, you should ask yourself “What is the best outcome that your potential customers are expecting?” Once you have been able to identify the outcomes, they will serve you well as marketing tools in your core marketing campaign.

Of course, before you discuss an outcome with your potential customers, you need to make sure that you have a process in place that will back it up and ensure that the outcome will occur.

Putting everything together

Building a comprehensive core marketing message that identifies you, pinpoints that problem that you are able to solve and gives your potential customer a strong sense of how his or her life will be after the problem is solved is essential to the success of your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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The Internet has profoundly transformed the way people learn about and shop for products. Years ago, companies reached their consumers through trade shows, print advertising, and other traditional marketing methods. Today, consumers start their shopping experience by looking on the Internet, in the search engines, the blogosphere, and social media sites. To remain competitive, businesses need to be found online by the consumers already searching for the products and services that you sell. Inbound Marketing is marketing focused on being found by customers. This concept is related to Seth Godin’s idea of permission marketing. Marketers “publish their way in” (via blogs, social media, etc.) in contrast to Outbound Marketing, where they used to have to “buy their way in” (via paid advertisements).

Traditional marketing (Outbound Marketing) is where companies focus on finding customers by advertising, cold calling, eMail blasts, and direct mail. This concept is related to intrusion marketing and Godin’s term interruption marketing.

Outbound Marketing intrudes on the attention of consumers by interrupting them in their other activities to advertise some product or service. Outbound Marketing has become less effective in recent years because of the more sophisticated ways that there are to block these kinds of advertising, eg, do-not-call lists, spam blockers, and TiVo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d5IZK5xgjY

With Inbound Marketing, in contrast, instead of interrupting people with television ads, the businesses create videos that potential customers want to see. Instead of buying display ads in print publications, the businesses create their own blog that people subscribe to and look forward to reading. Instead of cold calling, the businesses create useful content and tools so that people call them looking for more information.

Successful Inbound Marketing has three essential components:

(1) Content — The most important part of a successful Inbound Marketing strategy is creating great content that will bring people to you. One of the most popular ways to accomplish this goal is to keep an updated blog.

A blog can provide many benefits to your organization and almost all of them relate to Inbound Marketing. By creating great content, you’ll rise in organic search results, create linkable content, and educate your audience. All of these outcomes will help you bring in warm leads that have been prequalified through a Google search for relevant terms or by reading similar content that links to you.

In addition to blogging, there are many other forms of great content to create that will bring interested visitors. Hosting webinars, offering e-books for download, and developing microsites will all attract leads who are interested in your offerings and are eager to engage in a conversation with you about your organization.

(2) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) —  SEO allows potential customers and others to find your content easily. It is the practice of designing your website and links to your site to maximize your ranking in search engines, where most of your visitors begin their search process. Another important element is ensuring that you have a site that is optimized to close leads into deals and engages visitors once they "land" on your website.

(3) Social Media — Social media amplifies the impact of your content. When your content is distributed across and discussed on social networks, it becomes more credible and is more likely to draw qualified customers to your site.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3yCB7AvvAk

By sticking with these Inbound Marketing strategies, you’ll continually bring in new leads and grow; however, it won’t happen overnight. While Inbound Marketing will save you money, it does take an ample commitment and patience. You may not be in the top Google results for desired terms immediately, but by making a long-term commitment to Inbound Marketing, you will see results. This commitment requires that you create quality content through a Content Management System, interact with people through social media, and try new ideas to bring traffic to your site.

Inbound and Outbound Marketing complement each other. When you first get started, you’ll find that you do a lot more Outbound Marketing than Inbound Marketing. This is the time to experiment with all of the methods of Outbound Marketing. Try out direct eMail, advertisements, trade shows, and all of the outbound methods and find the ones that work best for you. Once you begin to gain momentum, more of your business will come from inbound methods.

A healthy combination of outbound and Inbound Marketing strategies makes a lot of sense.

Please visit CompuKol Communications site to learn more about how you can boost your business through Inbound Marketing.

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