Domino Theory's Marketing Blog

I was introduced at a community event recently and was asked to say a few words about Domino Theory: Smarter Business Communications. The audience was a group of small- and mid-sized business owners. As a key part of our Inbound Marketing strategy, I prefer to learn about my customers business rather than focus on my own, so instead of talking about Domino Theory, I asked a series of questions.



1. How many of you have a formal marketing communications plan that you follow?
About one third of the attendees in the room raised their hands.

2. How many of you who raised your hands include Internet marketing in your communications plan?
About half of the first group raised their hands.

3. How many of those include blogging and social media in their Internet communications plan?
Most of the group with hands raised kept them raised.

4. How many of you with hands still raised apply analytics to your Internet communications to measure results?
Almost all the remaining hands dropped.

5. How man of you would like to find more profitable customers?
All the hands in the room went up.

This isn't unusual among small- and mid-sized businesses. Business owners are generally very good at what they do, they are also generally not very good at marketing, and by not being good at marketing they fail to reach optimum profitability. But here's the kicker, being good at your business is exactly what Inbound Marketing is all about!

My father-in-law is retired in Arizona, but is a skilled woodworker and builds cabinets for friends and family to stay busy and make a little cash. The stuff he builds is really good (we have a number of pieces in our house here in El Dorado Hills). The woodworking he does requires special tools and special woods. So where do you think he shops? Does he go to Home Depot or does he go to specialty shops? He goes to specialty shops!

The people who work in the specialty hops are experts! They know the tools and how to use them, they know the woods and their characteristics. They are able to talk his language, share tips, and act as a resource. The people at Home Depot can tell him in what aisle he might find what he needs.

You're an expert in your business, right? Isn't that why customers come to you? You have the skills and knowledge to provide a product or service that is better than the competition. You deliver a memorable customer experience and build relationships with your customers so they continue doing business with you and refer their friends and business associates.

An Inbound Marketing plan can do all of this and more!

When you share your knowledge and expertise in blogs and social networks you establish your expertise, your role as the go-to business. It doesn't matter whether you run a restaurant, a dental practice, or any other business. Your customers want the same thing! They want access to your expertise. It's your job to share it with them!

If you're a dentist, it's as easy as including a brief message in your appointment reminder e-mails about what procedures you will be performing at the appointment and why they are important. You can include a link to more information about them so your patient shows up informed and prepared. Everyone wants to like their dentist, but I like my aunt and don't want her fingers in my mouth. I want my dentist to demonstrate expertise!

If you're a restaurant owner, the same thing applies. The most common social media posts I see from restaurants are about specials, what's for lunch, and what a great place your spot is to watch the game. People may want to know that information, but most aren't on social networks to be sold something! You need to offer more! Want customers to watch the game at your place? Tell them about that crazy AV system you had installed! Write a blog post and get into the nitty gritty, how many screens, how many games can be watched at once, how the system is networks, why it's the best! Want them eating in your restaurant? Share how you source food, your special preparation techniques, the special equipment i your kitchen that allows your chef to outperform the home cook.

But all of this takes a plan! It requires goal setting, timelines, publishing schedules, monitoring, and measurement. As a lawyer, you would never argue a case by the seat of your pants - don't market your practice by the seat of your pants either!



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Tags: Content Marketing, Inbound marketing, social media, Facebook, Communications, plan, Business, El Dorado Hills, blog, Social, Honest, Sacramento, Folsom, Smarter

Tags: leads, Marketing, Content Marketing, Inbound marketing, Facebook, Communications, Customer Acquistion, Business, El Dorado Hills, word-of-mouth, strategic, customers, Sacramento, Folsom, Smarter, El Dorado County

Just like Smarter Business Communications is part of our DNA at Domino Theory, martial arts is part of our lives at home. My wife and I started our kids in kinder-kicks before they started grade school. We thought it would be a great way to help them develop their coordination while learning respect and discipline in a setting outside the home. Somewhere along the way, rather than turning martial arts into something we make the kids do (you parents know what I mean!), we decided we would turn it into a family activity - something we could do together, forever.



We've all watched action movies and seen various martial arts performed. I always thought, as a pretty good athlete, how hard could martial arts be? Kick, punch, I mean I wasn't Bruce Lee, but I'd done these things since I was a kid. I didn't know, what I didn't know.

The thing I remember most about my early training was how awkward the movements felt, how difficult it was to master the little things - proper stances, balance, hand positions. I was learning what I didn't know. My recourse was to to muscle my way through, eschewing technique for brute force.

Slowly, and I mean slowly over the course of years, I began to learn to flow, to relax my movements and allow speed rather than mass to power my strikes and kicks. Force=Mass x Acceleration²; Acceleration contributes exponentially more to force than mass does, and since you can't easily alter your mass, concentrating on speed will better increase your force. I could do this, but I needed to concentrate, to tell myself to relax, to allow my muscles to loosen and flow. I could do this only so long as I was conscious of doing it.

Now years into my practice, I am a 2nd degree black belt in my school (as are my wife and kids). My instructor occasionally mentions how much I've improved and how much better and relaxed my movement is (it still needs lots of work). I can more often let my subconscious take over and put movements together into a flow without having to think about them.

Equally important to me, I have also learned why pursuits like the martial arts, piano, chess, writing, etc. are lifelong endeavors, why earning a black belt is not just a box to check along the way.

The more I learn and the more I advance, the more I realize what I don't know and the more I see where my skills need improvement. The farther I advance, the farther away the final destination of expertise seems. However, I can also recognize how far I've come and can better respect the perspective of the white belts who come to class thinking like I did, how hard can this be? They are just beginning to learn what they don't know. Many never get past that stage - they decide they don't want to make the commitment to learning a new skill, and I can't blame them - it is a commitment of hours, weeks, months, and years - a lifetime.

But you know what? We all start there in any new pursuit! A black belt is just a white belt that didn't quit! By starting and not quitting we are way ahead of those who never start at all.

These 4 stages my training goes through are the normal stages of learning. To put it perspective, think about when you learned to drive.

1. You don't know what you don't know. Riding around with your parents, you always thought driving would be easy. If you are like I was, you were better at it than your parents before you even got behind the wheel!


2. You know what you don't know. The first time you get behind the wheel, you can't find the pedals with your feet, your eyes can't find the mirrors, the car doesn't seem to go where you steering it. It is much harder than you had imagined it would be.


3. You consciously can perform the skill. You can drive, but it takes all your concentration (turn signal, mirror, look over your shoulder, change lanes...).


4. Until finally, you subconsciously can perform the skill. Now you drive down the highway and realize after five minutes, you have no idea what's been going on around you because you've been lost in thought; your conscious mind is engaged in another activity while your subconscious mind is driving the car. You've mastered driving and can drive without even thinking about it.

I've been going through this same process in the world of social media and content marketing since I launched Domino Theory. I have over 25 years experience in media and marketing. I have been involved in web site and e-mail marketing since the early days of both in the 1990's (just like I was always active in sports and fitness). But social media, content marketing, search engine optimization and similar skills were areas outside my daily work (like martial arts was new to me). It was easy to ignore them since I was entrenched in "traditional" media and marketing - I didn't know what I didn't know.

And just like when I started in martial arts, I thought, "How hard can this social media stuff be?" Fortunately, my martial arts experience helped me to quickly realize I was a social media white belt. I realized right away what I didn't know. I dove into reading, researching, and tapping social media and online training.

The more I learn, the more I realize I have to learn. The better I get, the more I realize there are people who know more than I do. But I also know that I am way ahead of most. Most, like the white belts who never come back after visualizing the journey ahead, have decided they don't have the time, energy, or inclination to learn a new skill or fit a new activity into their lives.

This describes most business owners I meet when it comes to social media and business communications. They haven't even walked in the door to the dojo yet to put on their first white belt and step onto the mat. They are mostly very good at what they do, but they don't do business communications! And that's too bad. Too bad because they are falling short of optimizing their business opportunities. And too bad because if they continue to ignore the opportunity they will eventually be leapfrogged by a competitor that made the commitment.

You are a black belt in your business arena. No one knows your business better than you do. No one needs your expertise more than your customers do. No one is looking for your expertise more than your potential customers are. A smarter business communications plan will allow you to stake a claim to your expertise in your marketplace, make you the go-to resource. It will help you keep customers around longer and attract more of them. To share that expertise, you need a smarter business communications plan.

Unless you plan to sell your business next week, now is the time to join the social media dojo. If you do it now, chances are excellent you'll be there long before your competitors and gain that first mover advantage. The longer you wait, the more you put your business at risk.

Working on smarter business communications is a lifelong pursuit. At some point, probably sooner rather than later, the skills will be required for business survival. You've likely thought about it before and you know it to be true. There is no better time than now to start your training.


 


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Tags: Marketing, Content Marketing, social media, Content, Communications, Customer Acquistion, plan, Business, Social, strategic, customers, Smarter

Domino Theory works with a lot of small businesses on communications plans that often include Facebook. These communications plans are almost always targeted towards customer acquisition and retention, but we are continually encouraging our clients not to ignore internal communications.A great tool for improving internal communications and collaboration, especially when the team works from different locations, is Facebook's Secret Groups.



Facebook Groups are a great way to segment both the distribution of your content and to filter your listening to specific people (family, classmates, clients, etc.). Secret Groups take the idea one step further by making your Group interaction invisible. Activity in these Groups does not show up in your personal or business timeline, is not indexed by Google, and is invisible to anyone not in the Group - even if they have the URL!

Set up is simple, when you set up your new Group simply choose "Secret: only members can see the Group, see and make posts." All communications within the Group are visible only amongst members. While I don't suggest using this if there is a need for strict confidentiality, it is a great tool for business collaboration.

Now that your Group is set up and you've invited your members, you have created your virtual work space. Within the secret group you can share documents, have group chat, share photos and videos, and even have a shred e-mail address where your can send messages to the entire team and can upload and post remotely via mobile devices.

It's Domino Theory's belief that before you begin to communicate with audiences outside your organizations  you should have your internal communications strategy in place. This is an often overlooked and under-managed piece of a Smarter Business Communications plan. Facebook's Secret Groups are just one of many tools that your company should be exploring as social invades the enterprise!

 

Tags: Content Marketing, Facebook, Communications, plan, Business, Social, Smarter, Internal

We at Domino Theory have been talking and reading a lot about Steve Jobs since the news of his passing last night. We're not interesting in writing another obit, you can find any number of them online (but if you read only one, read Steve Levy's from Wired).

I'm a bit of a late-comer to the Apple eco-system. I spent most of my career in the corporate world where PC's and BlackBerry' were the tools of choice. For far too long I put up with the blue screen of death, viruses, and all the PC annoyances we all know far too well.

But, when it came time to get a PC for my kids, it was Apple all the way. And when I left my corporate gig and started Domino Theory, I trashed the berry and grabbed an iPhone. I also switched to an iMac. I haven't looked back for a second

My mother has been the family Mac evangelist. She's been Mac all the way since she trashed her Osborne in the early '80's. She had the first iPhone, and beat the rest of the family to the store to buy an iPad. Having not been hindered by the need to connect to the corporate email server, work with Microsoft Office products, or any of the other ankle bracelets that come with the corporate PC, she made the choice that serves her needs - an intuitive system that delivered performance with a sense of style.

In a nutshell, that is Apple. Form delivering function.

It will be interesting to study in the years to come the detail that went into the Jobs/Apple decision making and product development. Why was Steve Jobs able to identify what we wanted when we didn't even know it ourselves? What can we learn from him that we can apply to our own lives?

Will there be another Steve Jobs? I say yes. But I doubt he or she will work in technology.

Steve Jobs was not a technologist, he was an artist. An artist who applied his gift to technology and changed an industry as only an artist can. These people don't come around very often. When they do, they stand the world on its ear. They leave even their peers gasping at their brilliance. They create such a chasm between themselves and the past, that decades later they remain the standard bearer. They can be emulated and studied, but the gift cannot be learned.

Who else has been like this? In my lifetime, few if any have. The closest suggestion I've heard is from Nicholas Thompson of the New Yorker. He compares Jobs to a 20th century artist that we all know, who changed his industry just as dramatically as Jobs did his, who has also gone to meet his maker, and who to this day is studied and emulated but has never been matched.

Here are some quotes from that person, but I can hear any of these also coming from the mouth of Steve Jobs. Words of geniuses are always worth hearing.

• “If you understood everything I said, you’d be me”


• “Do not fear mistakes - there are none.”


• "I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life."


• “When you’re creating your own shit, man, even the sky ain’t the limit.”


• “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.”

              -Miles Davis



 

Tags: Content Marketing, Communications, Business, blog, Honest, Smarter

At Domino Theory we continually are talking to businesses that have no formal communications plan or strategy. Many of these businesses are moving as fast they can to running day-to-day operations and while they'd like to have a communications plan, they view it as a "soft" business area meaning it would be nice to have, but not necessary to profitable operations.

Domino Theory's response?
- Define profitable.
- How profitable do you want to be?
- How much more profitable could you be?

Studies conducted over the last two decades suggest that formally documenting a company's communication strategies positively impacts the bottom line. In fact, consulting firm Watson Wyatt found that companies with the "highest levels of effective communication experienced a 26 percent total return to shareholders" over a four-year period as compared to the "-15 percent return experienced by firms that communicate least effectively," as reported in "The Essentials of Corporate Communications and Public Relations," published by the Harvard Business School Press. 

Putting together a Smarter Business Communications Plan does not need to be a daunting exercise nor does it need to dominate your working hours. Done correctly, taking your business through the following steps will have benefits far beyond the development of a Communications Plan.



Domino Theory's Smarter Business Communications Planning

Objective
Define your desired outcome. Be specific. More customers isn't enough. How many more? Over what time frame? Are some customers more profitable than others? How are they different? Are you looking to grow a market or grow share in an existing market? What is your current competitive situation? Who are the leaders and laggards in your market? What are they doing better, worse and differently than you? It would be highly beneficial at this stage to complete an entire SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats). How do customers find you? Why do they leave? Research shows word-of-mouth to be the number one influence among purchasers. Keep this in mind as you shape your communications objectives. Most importantly, always tie your communications objectives to business objectives.

Resources
What resources of time and money can you allocate to a communications plan? Should you manage this in-house or contract with an outside firm like Domino Theory? There are benefits to both approaches, but if keeping the process in-house means you won't get around to getting a Smarter Plan in place, be honest with yourself. Even if you outsource, you will need to dedicate time in your calendar each week and month for status updates and evaluation, so don't expect to be able to hand off the process completely.

Audit Your Current Communications
Take an inventory of all of your current communications. Get copies of every every piece of collateral, print outs of web pages, social media pages, signage, logos, promo pieces, etc. What is working? What isn't? What is being neglected? What is current? What is out of date? What are you doing well? What are you doing poorly? Do an honest evaluation and build from what you have already created.

Define Your Audiences
Most businesses will have multiple audiences to address through a Smarter Communications Plan. Internal audiences, existing customers, past customers, potential customers, and influencers are among the audiences you should consider for your plan.

Craft Your Message
You will likely find that there is significant crossover of the messaging for the various audience segments you've defined. Each segment is likely at a different stage of their buying cycle (Interest, Educate, Trial, Purchase, Reaffirm). A well crafted message can often speak to each segment of the cycle eliminating the need to create a new message for each. Testing your messaging at this stage is an important step that is overlooked by too many businesses. Include A/B testing in your plan. Testimonials can also be very powerful, ask for them from satisfied customers.

Select Your Communications Channels
Advertising, brochures, flyers, web sites, e-mail, and social media are often the first channels that come to mind. But don't overlook verbal communications - are there conversations within your place of business and with your audiences that you can start now? Can signage and logos be better displayed? Start with the basics and move from there.

Build a Communications Timeline
Which of your communications elements should roll out first? Which will take longer to create and implement? Set priorities and deadlines. Commit to your dates!

Measure and Tweak
None of the above matters if you don't have the tools in place to measure your progress. If you set measurable objectives against time in Step 1 (above) you now can measure the success of your program. Keep rolling with what works and tweak and evolve the elements that aren't delivering as expected. Be sure you are measuring both business and communications objectives. The feedback you get from this sage of the implementation is your roadmap as you revisit each of the steps outlined above.

Remember, a product, service, or business strategy that is not widely and skillfully communicated to company stakeholders is likely to limp along and eventually fail or simply disappear. Don't short sell yourself or your business by not letting the world know what you do and how good you are at doing it. The only one who will be happy with that strategy is your competition!

For a free consultation on your Smarter Business Communications Plan, contact us through the form below or fill out our interactive planning worksheet online here. [contact-form-7 id="541" title="Contact form 1"]

Tags: leads, Marketing, Content Marketing, Content, Communications, Customer Acquistion, plan, Business, word-of-mouth, blog, time management, strategic, customers, advocates, Smarter

Domino Theory can come to only one conclusion: Netflix wants out of the DVD rental business.



We've been a Netflix subscriber since July of 2001. At that time our kids were little, we were homebound many weekends and evenings, and the ability to have 3 movies on hand at any given time without the worry of late fees was manna from heaven (this has absolutely nothing to do with the detour to return a DVD on the way to hospital for the birth of our first child - I swear!). We've been turning family and friends onto Netflix since the early days.

Our kids, now pre-teens, stream movies and TV shows and we watch our DVD's, all for only $19 a month. Well, that was BEFORE Netflix decided that streaming and renting deserve unique billing structures. Now we pay $26 a month for the same privilege.

The price change caused us to look at our Netflix usage and evaluate the relationship. While the kids still stream movies and TV shows with some regularity, we watch fewer and fewer movies on DVD (FWIW, we have a BluRay player, but still watch DVD's primarily). Our thinking was that it's only a few $ a month more and we'll probably watch more movies during the winter when it's dark earlier and there are fewer evening activities to draw us outside.

But Netflix wasn't done with us! Today Netflix announced that Streaming and DVD rental will become two entirely separate businesses. WTF? Was Netflix broken? Did anyone outside of Netflix want the services divided? Each service, Netflix for streaming and Qwikster for DVD rentals, will have its own web site and they won't be integrated? Really?


Netflix' CEO, Reed Hastings, is undoubtedly smarter than we are at Domino Theory. He must know what he's doing here. He must know that announcing this change on the heels of the recent pricing increase is going to tick off a huge chunk of his loyal customer base. I mean he's sending all his Netflix customers back to square one by shifting the DVD business to a new site and a new name. Forget about the tech savvy customers who are reading about this today in their business feed, what about all those movie fans who don't have the technology or know-how to stream and could care less about it. Off to Qwikster with ye!

So what is Netflix really up to? The only conclusion we can come to is that Netflix really doesn't give two hoots about their DVD customers. The margins for the streaming business must be good enough that any small growth there will replace the larger loss of customers on the DVD side (adding game rentals ain't gonna make up the difference, that's for sure!). Netflix is ready to take on Comcast, DirecTV, Hulu, Apple, Amazon and all other comers in the streaming space. Netflix must be willing to walk away from their dominant business in DVD rentals.

So here's how Domino Theory is voting: For the time being, we'll keep our Netflix account for the streaming service. When we're asked to migrate to Qwikster for the DVD rentals, we'll be checking out. Meanwhile, Netflix is forcing our hand to explore all the competitive movie-on-demand/content streaming services we've only flirted with up until now.

You tell us, does Netflix have  Smarter Communication Plan?

 

Tags: Marketing, Content Marketing, Content, Communications, Customer Acquistion, plan, Business, strategic, customers, Honest, Smarter

Tags: Marketing, Content Marketing, social media, Facebook, Communications, plan, Business, Social, customers, Smarter, Twitter

Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Tumblr, and Twitter, too? What's next?

Get used to it. Social networks are still in their infancy. Anyone who tells you they know where all this is heading, is full of it. All I know is that if you're not jumping aboard to figure out how you're going to integrate all this into your Smarter Business Communications plan you don't have a smarter business communications plan!

Twitter is 5 years old this year. Not only are businesses using it to communicate and make money, an entire eco-system of businesses has sprung up to ease the use and help increase the efficiency of this really cool micro-blogging tool.

So, how can a company communicate a business message and their corporate values in 140 characters of type? And who's reading that stuff anyway?

Look, if you want to reach influencers, you need to be using Twitter. Facebook has more users and LinkedIn is more B2B-centric, but according to research from Exact Target, people come to Twitter because they WANT to influence others.

Daily Twitter users are continually looking for ways to add Followers and increase their influence. While the research shows that passive users of Twitter are decreasing their participation in this network, the most influential segment of Internet users are INCREASING their use. These people are even showing positive response to promoted Tweets! Aren't these are the exact people your Smarter Business Communications plan should target!

To top it off, the research shows that consumers follow a brand in order to interact. Isn't that the whole idea behind this social media stuff? If you're only using these tools to pump out your press releases and promote your products and services, you're getting tuned out anyway. You have a better chance of getting consumers to interact on Twitter than you have getting them to sign up for your newsletters or "like" your page on Facebook.

Consumers on Twitter want authenticity, they want insider information (remember, they WANT to influence others!), they want to get to know the people behind the scenes at your company, they want special offers, and they want to see how you are going to respond when when someone gets all up in your face. Be real. Turn off the corporate speak.

One of the top complaints about Twitter is also one of its greatest attributes - brevity. Consumers say they can get what they need from Twitter without spending too much time crafting an e-mail. It's quick and to the point.

Real time communications doesn't get much better than with Twitter. Within a minute of the August 23 earthquake on the east coast, Twitter had over 40,000 earthquake related messages. Within 4 minutes over 3 million Twitter users had earthquake related messages in their status updates. Imagine what this means for business. Whether for promotional purposes, internal communications, customer service, or crisis management, the ability to communicate with huge numbers of consumers in real time has never been better.

Like with any new tool, getting a handle on how best to use Twitter will take work and practice. There is no one right way to use it and you should count on continually updating your methods. But if you think you can get by without playing, you might soon find yourself paying solitaire.

 

Tags: Marketing, Content Marketing, Communications, Business, Social, advocates, Honest, Smarter, Twitter

Tags: Communications, plan, Business, strategic, Honest, Smarter, Internal, Uncategorized