If you run a business and you do not employ a CFO chief financial officer may I recommend that you examine why not?
Karen Tobeck, CFO
I have spent two years working with Karen Tobeck and value she brings far surpasses the fee I pay.
Anybody who runs a business has three skills they need, delivering the product or service, sales and finance. Few people can do two of these. Most people can do one. Nobody can do three. This means is you must identify what you enjoy doing for your business and the one area where you need another advisor.
For me, it is finance.
Karen provides a monthly check-in with me and bi-monthly business plan goal-setting and results alignment. The key to our successful partnership is that she asks the right questions and helps me to focus with calm objectivity and external focus.
Members of my mastermind group have also hired her from their businesses. It does not matter if you already have an accountant or a bookkeeper on board. I have both and neither service is provided by Monteck Carter, Karen’s firm.
If I have challenged you today please go and look at her profile and get in touch if you would like an introductory short chat.
This November, we’ve got another breakfast seminar happening! We will be covering 3 ways to change your business thinking and actions for 2018 success.
Has your business reached a standstill even with new business strategies and tactics implemented?
Perhaps it is time to renew your thinking with us! Getting your thinking right is the key to developing the right business strategy and tactics. Digital marketing is one of the most effective tools to utilise when unlocking business growth and boosting brand awareness. To help you better understand how incorporating digital marketing and the right business strategy can unlock secrets that underpin success, we have this insightful breakfast seminar lined up for you.
https://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpg00Creative Agency Secrets Teamhttps://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpgCreative Agency Secrets Team2017-11-10 16:16:122022-12-19 11:57:293 Ways to Change Your Business Thinking & Actions for 2018 Success
When it comes to a marketing report, you may dread the idea of seeing pie charts, bar graphs and numbers floating around. That’s not to mention the accompanying dry, boring analysis of these results, written in what looks to be a different language.
If you think this, you’re so very wrong.
Recently, I wrote up a competitor strategy analysis for a client, Living Goodness. The results took no longer than 30 minutes, there were no graphs, and the report reads just over a page long!
Read on to find out exactly how I accomplished this – it’s super simple, I promise.
Seriously, this is 97% of my report – short and simple!
#1. Find your competitor
If you’re running a business and have no idea who your competitors are, you need to remedy this quickly.
Open up your internet browser in incognito mode and Google search a few keywords on what your business is about. Why incognito? Well, the search results will be personalised to your search history so you want to find a competitor that is worth analysing.
Living Goodness sells sauerkraut, so I typed into Google, “sauerkraut nz”. Google has been working on improving localised searching since around 2015. While obvious searches such as “Italian food” will bring up local restaurants, I needed to localise Living Goodness keywords so that Google knows I want to buy this product from a local store, as opposed to just needing a sauerkraut recipe.
Living Goodness ranks on the front page for “sauerkraut nz” (yay!) but so does a competitor. This will be the target of my strategy analysis.
Third place on the front page of Google! Yay Living Goodness!
In a new document for notes, I made three subheadings:
Website
Facebook
Instagram
You’ll need to adapt these to suit the media platforms of your client.
#2. Website
From the competitor’s website, I can see all their social media buttons on the top right. This is the first difference I note. Living Goodness’ social buttons are in the footer of every page, but that requires scrolling down to see. Placing additional social links somewhere on the homepage where they will be visible to visitors is the first thing I make note of in a section called “suggestions”.
There’s not much above the fold on the Living Goodness website…
I embark on a journey across the competitor’s website, making note of what they have and what Living Goodness don’t have on their website.
Along the way, I kept asking, “why?” For example, the competitor lists recent recipes on a sidebar on their landing pages. Why is this? Well, as a mere consumer searching for sauerkraut products, I can see that it will prompt me to head to the recipes page, especially if there’s a delicious concoction that catches my eye.
A sidebar can easily be installed into websites as an automated widget – this means any new recipes uploaded will reflect in this sidebar without additional action, thus providing fresh content for each time I visit their website.
#3. Social media
Next, I compared the social media platforms of Living Goodness with their competitor. I pulled up their Facebook and Instagram pages, and scrolled through like a scorned ex-girlfriend.
How often did they post? What sort of content were they posting? Did they do something different on their social media pages that Living Goodness didn’t do?
Who had more followers? Why and how? These were all very important questions that I needed to ask.
I also compared the hashtag activity because everyone knows that behind every successful Insta-famous account is a strong hashtag game (also pretty photos, of course). As this competitor sold products that were pretty similar to ours, I derived a list of hashtags that our client doesn’t use but should do.
Living Goodness’ products are very visually appealing, so their Instagram needs to reflect that.
#4. Suggestions
Of course, I didn’t want Living Goodness to copy their competitor post for post. This strategy was merely to boost their digital presence, just based on my observations of their competitor.
One important thing I had to keep in mind at all times was objectivity. I had to see Living Goodness’ competitor from the eyes of a hungry 20-something-year-old who just wanted buy sauerkraut.
This allowed me to cruise through their website and social media platforms from a fresh perspective. What would I first notice if I wanted to buy some of their products? What would annoy me if I were trying to see their stockists? If I needed to read reviews of their products, was it easily accessible?
With this frame of mind, I also turned my attention to Living Goodness’ own platforms to see what needed to be changed.
From all this, I wrote out a brief but very useful competitor strategy, using clear subheadings and bullet points. Easy to write, easy to read!
I all but stalked the social pages of Living Goodness. As you can see, this is a proven and justified technique.
#5. Client meeting
I scheduled a meeting with the lovely Fiona from Living Goodness and ran through this report with her. It was important that she took the same journey I did, so in a few cases, I got her to open up the social media platforms to see exactly what I was referencing.
Next time I conduct a competitor analysis, I could include screenshots to highlight my points. As it was, Living Goodness only have one major competitor, and as I had explained my strategy clearly, it wasn’t just another boring report to be tossed aside.
When it comes to working for a client, it can be too easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. This report showed that we like to keep an eye on the industry to boost the presence of Living Goodness.
https://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Untitled.jpeg598977Creative Agency Secrets Teamhttps://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpgCreative Agency Secrets Team2017-11-08 15:41:352022-12-19 11:57:28How to do a super simple competitor strategy analysis
OysterCatchers has a new training programme ‘Learning to Fly’ for awesome female entrepreneurs
vimeo.com/233527720
Generation Zero,
Bizdojo,
Lion Corp Young Entrepreneur Scheme
Alexia Hilbertidou of GirlBoss New Zealand
Auckland University Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship – Includes Velocity programme, lots of other extra curricula and the Unleash Space a new innovation hub and maker space
Social Innovation NZ – engages with students to make a change within their community through social impact such as a social enterprise
Entre a student run entrepreneurial NZ registered company, that also runs as a student club on the campus of University of Canterbury. Our website is: http://www.entre.co.nz and our Facebook webpage is: https://www.facebook.com/entre.at.uc/
Check out these as a starting point for your own individual needs. And please use the comments to add others to the list.
International opportunities
As I notice others, I will add them on the list below
https://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpg00Rebecca Caroehttps://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpgRebecca Caroe2017-09-27 10:34:492020-05-27 17:30:38Youth Entrepreneur Organisations in New Zealand
Ready for next year? No, of course you’re not. This is normal.
But you intend to get ready and to plan your marketing, don’t you?
Make those resolutions happen by booking in to our January 2017 Marketing Year Planning Workshop.
Join us for a Marketing and Business Development Workshop to help you get your year plan sorted!
What Will I Get Out Of It?
We’ll walk you through our 8 Step Business Development Methodology, which will create a detailed plan of activities for the year that will drive new leads into your business and position you to achieve your goals for 2017.
You’ll also learn tips, techniques and marketing tools for your business which are vital to your modern marketing success. These are tried and tested as we do them ourselves and for our clients.
Join our Group Workshop Session on 26th January 2017 in Auckland for $500.00 + GST. This fee is per business and so you can bring 1 colleague with you.
Build your business development plan for the next year and guide your business towards success.
This workshop is for business owners and managers who are responsible for finding new clients and growing revenues. It will show you the practical, tried and tested techniques that the Creative Agency Secrets team uses for its clients.
You will learn:
How to create a unique company profile.
A check list of marketing activities .
New business pipeline analysis and tracking template.
What you need to do to get better known in your industry.
Learn relationship building for getting and keeping long term clients.
How to spot opportunities for new business sales.
The business process that delivers leads.
What to measure to track progress.
Each attendee will take home a high level plan for their business – planned through the year with month by month activities.
Testimonials from Nov 2016 attendees
“It was good to be in the group and to feed off Rebecca’s comment and experience. I don’t record leads and whether they were successful and that will definitely be useful in future.” Nicola Manning, Nicola Manning Design
“I enjoyed it.It was definitely worthwhile.I thought it was a good bunch of people and it was very interesting.” Dave Sauvage, Sauvage Design
It was really good and I will do a strategy accountability partner each month.I am going to leave my paid mentor group and do this instead. I have to get into the headspace to actually go back and review everything and set goals for each month. The wide range of people was very good especially the male female diversity. Jo-Anne Hitchcock, H Architecture
“I thought it was useful and when people are at different stages that’s interesting.I could do a few things differently which is partly a time thing. Beneficial – I got out of it as much as I could.” Jeremy Sutton, Jeremy Sutton Lawyers
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https://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/workbook.png844642Rebecca Caroehttps://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpgRebecca Caroe2016-11-23 16:47:292022-12-19 11:57:20New Year Marketing Planning - resolve to do this!
A question I answered in Quora forum: “What’s the best entrepreneurship or business course – it can be free or paid”.
The best course of action is to go apprentice yourself to an entrepreneur you respect and learn by working with/for them. I suggest doing this before or at the same time as starting your own business. Experience is worth a load more than book-learning from theoreticians.
I do not recommend paying $$$ for a university course UNLESS it is part time and closely aligned with working on a business you are currently running. Then you get to put into practice what you are being taught immediately.
It takes 6 months and is 1 day per month with one-to-one coaching sessions in between formal classroom sessions. I recommend you ask them if you can join it virtually – the next course starts October 2016. It made a gigantic change to my business and taught me a lot about the parts of business entrepreneurship that I didn’t know (and the things I didn’t realise I needed to know!).
Shortcomings of book learning entrepreneurs
I find that any book, magazine or podcast that gives advice is helpful – but only up to a point. The authors never, NEVER talk in full detail about their mistakes, their mis-directions, bad decisions and failures. They may reference them, but you will not get the full picture.
The value is in experiencing these situations and learning from them.
If I were to tell you in public about experiences I’ve had like a bullying client, a supplier who stole from us, a bad person we hired etc you would begin to get more of an idea. But it would be unprofessional to write these things in public and I may get sued. But it is the EXPERIENCE of these situations that helps you to grow as a business person and entrepreneur.
My personal solutions to the need for experience and a fully rounded business education is on-the-job learning (reading / podcasts / business books / mentor advice) supplemented by:
Mastermind Group of business owners – we meet monthly face to face and share / seek advice in a trusted, confidential roundtable. [We have a vacancy for 2 people to join our Auckland group – please ask]
What is your advice on how to learn entrepreneurship?
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https://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/business-course.jpg341845Rebecca Caroehttps://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpgRebecca Caroe2016-08-25 15:03:242022-12-19 11:57:18What's the best entrepreneurship / business course?
What are the best ways to validate a B2B idea without spending a lot on product development first?
I currently run a B2C online service. I’m looking to pivot to B2B as a way of growing our business.
Creative Agency Secrets are very practical and tactical marketers so in this answer we will give you a series of steps to run through. You will need to run through them all several times – for example, if you do 1,2,3 and it’s not working, go back to 1 and start again, improving each time.
You will need to be very self-critical in order to improve and if you have not got experience in B2B, we strongly recommend you find a mentor or coach who can be objective and help shortcut the number of iterations.
First – write out the revised offer as it would apply to a B2B situation. Make this a one-page print and pdf brochure.
Second – approach people you already know and who could buy the service and ask them to appraise the document and give you honest feedback. You can find these people on Linked In or via the local chamber of commerce. Get the feedback face to face if possible and / or by phone. DO NOT use email. You want to be there in person to ask supplementary questions such as “why did you say that?” to clarify your understanding.
Third – try to push a sale or two from one of your market testing interviews. Be prepared to offer a money back guarantee or a discount with the option to name them as a client as the quid-pro-quo.
Fourth – You should now have a sense of which TYPE of B2B firm could buy the service. So go and buy a mailing list of similar businesses in your local area. Approach them all and repeat – raising the price, reducing the guarantee as you get more focused onto your sweet spot.
Fifth – as you approach more, try to refine the offer and price if sales are not forthcoming. This will allow adaptation to refine the offer to suit the market. And also gradually withdraw from the face to face and phone and pull back to web (low cost) sales. You may still need telephone follow-up. Experiment with having a colleague do this calling rather than yourself as you further move to lower cost marketing tools.
Sixth – re-invest any profits into improving the marketing method and collateral.
That should give you a methodology. Now you will need very strong copywriting, CRM and sales skills. Buy or hire these for your support team.
Good luck and happy to help further.
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https://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/green-light.jpg341845Rebecca Caroehttps://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpgRebecca Caroe2016-07-06 16:51:552019-07-15 12:43:56How to market validate a B2B startup
This fifth step is where the hard work, diligence and persistence pay off in your search for success in new business development.
People buy from people they know, like and trust and so having an active relationship with prospects who remember your name when they want to and can get in touch with you easily when they want to is very important.
How memorable is your business?
People are forgetful. What are the ways that prospects use to remember your business?
I know people save the newsletters that I mail out. I find people write replies to Newsletters that I sent months ago and the reason is that they keep them “just in case” they need to get in touch again. Many businesses do not use a business database and this is a shortcoming.
There are many ways to stay in touch with people and it’s beneficial, as your mailing list grows, for you to have some that are semi-automated and do not require a lot of your time in order to fulfil.
Good examples of these are autoresponders and newsletters. We also use social media as a way of staying in front of people we have a set-and-forget process of feeding RSS feeds through to our social media profiles so that we can appear to stay ahead of the news and on top of new developments even though we are not actually watching social media every hour of the day!
Staying memorable
Every business owner should have some form of regular networking in their diary. This could be as simple as a trade professional membership group, your chamber of commerce, or some specialist group for your area of expertise. Meeting people regularly is a very good way of staying front of mind. But beware, these people must be your prospects, not your competitors!
One way to find out if you are doing well in your relationship development is to track the number of new people we put into the business database. I collect business cards from as many people as I can who I think maybe of potential future interest to the business. This includes suppliers as well as prospective clients.
How and where do you get business cards? And what do you do with them?
It is important to have a careful plan to stay in touch with new people you meet. Some of them you want to spend time with and have a slowly developing individual relationship, others you can use mass communication. When planning your marketing, you need to think through these processes and organise all the communications necessary.
I have two special face-to-face relationship development techniques which I use. One is my circle of influence. The other is unhurried conversations.
A circle of influence is a small group of people who regularly feed new work through to us. These are people in parallel businesses whose services precede ours in the business service cycle. I meet with them on a quarterly basis or speak to them on the phone and they send us new enquiries and we are also able to reciprocate work back to them.
Unhurried conversations work on a slightly different format. It is a social event in the evening where I gather a group of interesting people around our board table for some afterwork drinks and nibbles. We use a format whereby only one person may speak any time. This forces everyone to listen carefully to what is being said. There is no agenda. The conversation takes whatever direction it wants to go. Learn more about the unhurried conversations format at this website. It is interesting that in this busy age of connected people and individuals so many people value a slower pace of talk, chat and interaction. Working at the slower pace allows my guests to take their time in thinking and considering whether they might work with us.
In summary – formalise all methods of building relationships between the business staff and prospective customers.
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https://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/relationship-development.jpg341845Rebecca Caroehttps://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpgRebecca Caroe2016-06-16 08:00:092019-08-13 15:17:16Step 5: Relationship development
Getting well-known for what you do is a very long-term process. But this should not deter you because it’s relatively easy nowadays to become known for a specific skill or product.
Becoming famous for being good at what you do in a public forum takes a few simple steps, repeated.
The goal of this step in the new business development process reinforces prospects’ decision-making when they come to select someone to do work for them or with them. If they can find out about you independently, and online they are far, far more likely to hire you then if they cannot find out about you.
Where is your brand findable in public?
So let’s have a look at the different places where a stranger could find out about you and your business and the things that you do.
Do you write articles?
Have you been mentioned in the news?
What about public speaking?
Have you ever been to a conference?
Do you ever speak or present at business events like BNI, the Chamber of Commerce or Local Business / Professional Membership Associations?
What about running workshops or webinars?
Do you host events at your own premises?
Could you invite clients and prospects to learn more about your skill and expertise in a face-to-face environment?
Here are some of the things that you could do to improve your “find-ability”.
Business awards Does your industry run annual awards and could you enter? Many parts of New Zealand have local Westpac Business Awards happening every year. This not only adds to your internal feelgood factor for the team by entering, but it also gives you handy PR and some external credibility if you get through to the final stages.
What about opinion formers? There are always people who are prepared to stand up and talk about your industry; could they quote you? These people may be journalists but often nowadays they might be bloggers or podcasters.
Networking is important for most businesses particularly if you want to win clients locally. Having actually met someone is a very strong and easy way of building trust. Find out where your local networking opportunities are. This may be the Chamber of Commerce, local meetup groups or BNI.
I do recommend you check out the website meetup.com because a lot of good events are run and publicised through there. You can search by location to filter. And also, look at Eventbrite for your country. You will see that Creative Agency Secrets does a lot of Eventbrite work and we find the people actually search this site and sign up to our events.
Members of your staff also talk about your company and it’s important that every time they mention your firm you want it to be positive and also consistent. It’s important that you, the business owner, are not the only ambassador for the business. Can you enthuse them?
Conferences, trade shows and exhibitions are another good place where you can get better-known. You could run a trade stand or you could just attend and see who else is there and talk to the other people you meet. If you’re able to get onto the conference speaking platform as a speech-giver then of course it’s a very good way to put your message across in a subtle manner and showcase your expertise. Do your research locally – are there conferences running and can you get a copy of the full attendees list if you are a speaker? This gives you an opportunity to get in touch with people after the event as well.
https://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/profile-raising.jpg341845Rebecca Caroehttps://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpgRebecca Caroe2016-05-19 08:00:182020-01-24 01:44:56Step four: Profile raising for new business
