Propel

Five Ways to Amp-Up Your Marketing and Accelerate Business

Whitney Keyes

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781601632333
• eBook ISBN: 9781601635785
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Want more customers? Need to increase social media followers? Want your name in the news to boost your brand and sales?

Propel: Five Ways to Amp Up Your Marketing and Accelerate Business is the ideal guide for marketing with tips, tools and trends for social media, word of mouth marketing, publicity, and more. It offers a straightforward, five-step approach to use the power of direct marketing to get to the next level. Propel shows how large corporations, small businesses, nonprofits, schools, governments, and other organizations can quickly reach the right people at the right time in the right way—to get the right results.

Including over 50 real-world examples of success and compelling case studies of digital and traditional marketing and PR success from around the world, this is a practical guide to help you break through all the noise in the marketplace and connect with the people you need to reach the most.

Includes examples and case studies of social media tools including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, as well as marketing strategies applicable for LinkedIn, Vine, Instagram, Infographics, Pinterest, Yelp, City Search, Urban Spoon, blogs, podcasts, and other marketing communication outlets.

Whitney Keyes is a marketing strategist, professor and a Fellow for the Center for Strategic Communication at Seattle University. Whitney worked as a senior Microsoft manager, strategic advisor for American Express and consultant to thousands of businesses around the world. While at Microsoft, she managed global marketing campaigns, including the launch of Office 2000, an $8 billion business, and helped create the Corporation's philanthropy program, Unlimited Potential. Whitney is an international speaker and received three grants from the U.S. State Department to empower social entrepreneurs, women leaders, NGOs and youth in Asia and Africa. She received the Small Business Administration's 2013 Women in Business Champion of the Year Award for Washington State, U.S.A.

Propel: Five Ways to Amp Up Your Marketing and Accelerate Business offers a go-to marketing resource for entrepreneurs, business owners, nonprofit directors. Even people working in marketing or publicity departments, as teachers and professors, and in agencies can use Propel to turn marketing ideas into strategic action that gets real results—fast.

PART I

STRATEGY:
Set Your Course for Success

It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the business of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall.

—Stephen R. Covey

Envisioning your success and setting clear goals to help you get there are the first steps toward effective marketing. The process of defining your goals includes familiarizing yourself with the environment you’re working in, including the ins and outs of your business and beyond. Ignoring these initial steps is like trying to build a house without knowing the first thing about construction. Most marketing plans that don’t work are shortsighted and lack specific objectives. Others are well-thought-out but performed at the wrong time or in the wrong environment.

In this first section of the book, I’ll show you how to be much more calculated and deliberate about your marketing. Using a strategic approach helps you map out a path for success and set solid goals within the context of your business marketplace.

Chapter 1 will help you envision what you need to achieve and identify how to get there. Next, you’ll narrow your range of ideas to a manageable level while learning how to avoid the most common pitfalls of goal-setting.

In Chapter 2, you’ll learn the importance of defining your landscape, or your business’s current situation. You’ll take a close look at your business, the competitive environment, and your industry as a whole. This will allow you to identify both challenges and opportunities, further narrowing the scope of your marketing so it’s much more effective.

Picking the right priorities up front and getting an accurate lay of the land will help you build a solid foundation before you start rolling up your sleeves and diving into your marketing. Being strategic helps to ensure that you stay focused on the goals that matter the most and find the most powerful position from which to ultimately move your business forward.

CHAPTER 1
Pick Your Priorities

TAMIKA VINSON WORKS AS a financial service counselor helping students navigate the system so they can secure enough money to pursue their educational dreams. But Tamika has a dream of her own. In the next year, she plans to open a retail store for women called iChelle. She’s not alone. According to a 2011 report released by Dun & Bradstreet on the state of small business, the United States has seen the highest percentage of startups in more than a decade, despite the recession.¹ Tamika’s already starting to think about how best to get the word out about her business to potential customers, but she knows before she heads too far down the promotional path she needs to map out a longer-term vision for her business. And she’s right.

As I mentioned earlier in the book, marketing is a lot of fun. You get to do all sorts of creative things such as produce videos and hold online contests for your customers. Yet this is part of the reason why so many business owners struggle with marketing. They haven’t pictured where they want to go and what they need to do to succeed. They often end up wasting time and resources on ineffective marketing activities and don’t get the results they desperately need.

I promise you’ll get to focus on all sorts of fun marketing activities very soon, but for now, I don’t want you to think about anything specific. I want you to open yourself up to amazing possibilities. To envision your broad future, imagine the big picture of what you’re really trying to accomplish and where you ultimately want to be with your business. Believe it or not, in order to be strategic with your marketing, you actually have to do some dreaming first. I’d like you to start thinking about your pie-in-the-sky ideas and extremely lofty ambitions. What I’m describing is your vision.

Many people use the terms vision and mission interchangeably. However, they are meant to be two entirely different things intended to help you get both inspired and focused. Vision and mission statements are foundational parts of business planning and play a key role in making your marketing work, too. In a nutshell, the vision is a descriptive picture of the future, and the mission is an action statement for the here and now that moves you toward the vision. I’ll spend a bit more time on both so you can see the role they play in your business and marketing efforts.

VISION

A vision is intended to be a statement that sums up your organization’s aspirations, hopes, and dreams. This phrase describes how your organization envisions the future and what your image is of a perfect world. It’s a long-term view of what you’re striving for. Most business planning is for a one- to five-year time frame, but an effective vision statement can include a much longer time frame. It’s what you envision might be possible in the next 10, 20, maybe even 100 years from now. In fact, you may never achieve it. That’s not the point. It’s more of a dream; an inspirational message. It gives you a place in the distant horizon to focus on; it’s absolutely within sight, but not within reach—yet. It should help motivate you, your staff, and, if you choose to share it externally, even your customers. Change the world. Make things better for kids. Help the environment. These are the things dreams—and vision statements—are made of.

I first came across this type of vision statement back when I worked at Microsoft. At that time, Bill Gates mapped out a very clear vision for the company: Put a computer on every desktop.

This simple, clear statement served a very strategic purpose in exciting customers around the world. It also helped to motivate employees like me. Everyone knew what the company was working toward. Would we ever see it happen? At that time in the industry, it was a huge stretch. But the idea kept us focused and we worked hard to try to get there someday.

Vision statements aren’t set in stone. They need to be designed to change and evolve. In time, with the introduction of products such as the Xbox and Internet Explorer, Microsoft was becoming more than just a business putting software CDs in boxes. And as more and more people started to work remotely and on mobile devices, the company needed a new vision statement to re-inspire employees and get customers and partners jazzed again. Microsoft eventually changed its vision: To help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential. The new sweeping phrase allowed the company to think even more broadly about how it could help people and organizations do more. This vision is still used by the company today.

Here are a few more examples of vision statements:

Nike: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world”

Goodwill Industries International: “To ensure every person has the opportunity to achieve his/her fullest potential and participate in and contribute to all aspects of life”

Keep in mind, the vision for your organization is meant to motivate future action and is not limited by your current situation. In the book First Things First, Stephen Covey describes it this way: “…vision is the ability to see beyond our present reality, to create, to invent what does not yet exist, to become what we not yet are. It gives us capacity to live out of our imagination instead of our memory.”² Here’s an example of how to put this into play for a smaller organization. Tamika, the soon-to-be entrepreneur I mentioned at the start of this chapter, also has a vision for her business, iChelle: “To create a nationally recognized brand that helps shape future leaders and uplift neighborhoods.”

Fueled by this powerful vision of where she wants to take her business and the positive impact it will make in communities around the United States, Tamika is ready to map out the next strategic part of her planning: her mission statement.

MISSION

If you think of your vision statement as being aspirational, the mission is all about action. In this way, the mission statement works hand-in-hand with the vision. It touches on the core purpose of your organization and what you’re doing now to strive toward reaching your vision in the future. What steps are you taking to bring that vision closer and within reach?

To give you an example of how the two statements work together, here’s an inspirational vision statement for Dress for Success, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of women in 110 cities across 12 countries. The organization provides professional clothing, employment retention programs, and ongoing support to its clients, helping them be self-sufficient and professionally successful. Its vision is: “To promote the economic independence of disadvantaged women.”

Now take a look at the organization’s mission statement. It does a good job of explaining how Dress for Success plans to take action and work toward making that vision come true: “We help disadvantaged women find and maintain employment, become financially savvy, improve their health and wellness, and achieve self-defined success.”

Now I want to shift gears and focus again on Tamika’s business. She too has a mission statement that is intended to help her take the right steps today to reach her longer-term vision for iChelle: “To help women feel confident, comfortable, and beautiful by providing affordable, upscale fashion and career development opportunities.”

Do you see how this message supports Tamika’s long-term vision for the business? She eventually plans to grow iChelle by adding new locations and potentially franchising once the company’s brand is nationally recognized. She also plans to give back to the community by creating jobs and internship opportunities. She’s unable to do all of these things in the first few years of her business, but she’s now on a mission to work toward reaching them.

VALUES

For an organization’s vision and mission to truly be effective, they must both reflect the organization’s values. These are the core beliefs in your business that are shared with everyone internally and, in many cases, externally. They help define and determine your culture and work together with your vision and mission. The three form a helpful framework you can use to better run your business and make smarter, more strategic marketing decisions.

On a personal level, our values come into play on a daily basis. If you value having a healthy lifestyle, you probably demonstrate that value by watching what you eat and exercising regularly. You may make a decision to invest in a gym membership or take time to go on a long walk with a friend a few times a week.

Business values are no different. They are usually a list of words or statements that outline what’s important to your organization and the core things that will guide and influence your attitudes and behavior. For example, if your organization values professional development, you might support an employee who wants to help your marketing efforts by speaking on an expert panel for the chamber of commerce. If you value work-life balance, you can justify your decision to leave work early on Thursday to attend an after-hours wine-tasting to have fun discovering new bottles. And who knows, you just might end up doing some networking and exploring new business development opportunities as well.

With more than 310 stores in North America and the United Kingdom, Whole Foods is a global leader in the natural and organic food business.³ The company has done an excellent job of creating a set of core values that accurately reflect what is truly important to the organization. They not only support the organization’s vision and mission of environmental sustainability and corporate responsibility, but they are also the underpinning of the company’s culture and are intended to remain constant. Whole Foods’s Website reads, “Many people feel Whole Foods Market is an exciting company of which to be a part and a very special place to work. These core values are the primary reasons for this feeling, and they transcend our size and our growth rate. By maintaining these core values, regardless of how large a company Whole Foods Market becomes, we can preserve what has always been special about our company. These ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Foreword by Maggie Winkel, Director of Merchandising, Nike, Inc
• Introduction
• Part I: Strategy —Set Your Course for Success
• Part II: Story —Connect With the People Who Matter Most
• Part III: Strength —Boost Your Efforts by Extending Your Reach
• Part IV: Simplicity —Keep the Plan and Process Straightforward
• Part V: Speed —Accelerate and Move Forward
• Conclusion : Keep Your Momentum
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author