Part of the mess I picked up was a note I keep on my desk: If you can’t get out of it, get into it. I mean, you can see, it’s RIGHT THERE. Except that when I picked it up I connected with it for the first time in a long time.

Standing there with it in my hand reminded me of two things:

There are things we think we know and believe and live our lives around. But we can get numb to them, even when they’re right in front of our faces (for 10 hours a day for Pete’s sake!). I’m stopping and noticing what’s important to me more now.

And second, if you can’t get out of it, get into it. I love this. It came from a book that attributes it to an Outward Bound teaching. I can’t trace it to them or anyone, but there is truth to it. That thing you’re avoiding, if you can’t get out of it, embrace it. So simple. Yet, every time I act on it I create progress in my life AND am a bit embarrassed by how easy that just was.

PS No animals were injured in this incident, and I discovered my Samsung monitor can take a lickin and keep on tickin!

Do people understand what you do?

Do they understand why you’re different?

Do they understand you understand their problem? Do you understand their problem?

And, how easy to you make it for people to understand these things?

Improve these simple things and your business improves. Simple? Yes. Easy? No. Don’t confuse simple with easy.

As a marketing consultant I have a similar message for clients:

Follow the smartest people in your field, and use social media to do it.

And that’s the beauty of social media, it makes it so easy to spend time with people much smarter than you.  Heck, you can (and should!) spend time with your competitors.

Then go to someone’s account and take a look at the people they follow and where they’ve left comments.  But you must first subscribe to their feed (a single click) in order to see who they follow and where they’ve commented.

Then click on “subscriptions,” the people they follow, and check out some of those people by hovering your mouse over a person’s icon to see a short blurb about them.  Go to their feeds and subscribe to them if they seem interesting.

Next click on “comments,” which shows you what they’ve commented on.  The thought here is people leave comments on the people’s feeds they are most interested in.  So, comments are a direct line to the people they think are smart.

Yep your mother was right, and social media makes it easier than ever to spend more time around smart people.

Always be building your list.

Don’t bother trying to buy an email list like you buy a list for direct mail.  While a few good ones exist, the chances of you buying a bogus list far, far outweigh the chances of you finding a good one.

Good email lists are built, literally, one address, or a handful of addresses, at a time.  Start with your customers.  Use an Excel spreadsheet with just a handful of columns: first name; last name; email address; company name; type of product bought.  The reason: you’ll want to personalize your messages, or perhaps send only to those people who bought a specific product.

Start another list for prospects from the free downloads on your site, blog commenters, inquiries, trade show passers-by, vendors.

Collect email addresses as you would dollar bills on the ground: every time you stumble upon one, regardless of where or when, pick it up.  Sitting down to add addresses once a week or month assures you’ll miss at least 20% of them.  And by the way, do you know what a good email address costs to buy (if you can find the good ones)?  About a buck.

Use a service to send, manage and report.

Google “email marketing” and you’ll find a million to choose from.  An email service sends the email for you, manages lists you upload, provides design templates for your emails, handles opt outs and bounces and, most importantly, gives you reports on response.  Most start at around $15-20 per month, which allows you to send to a few thousand people.  The cost goes up as the number of people you send to increases.  We use and recommend myemma.com.  Using a service simply makes it easier on you.  Also, as you build your list into the thousands, some email providers may label you as a spammer.  Email services are known to the spam police.

Write the Subject Line last, and give it its due.

Don’t assume that because they are your customers people will automatically read what you send.  You have to earn their attention, and the subject line is where you do that.  Think newspaper article headline: punchy, but descriptive.  It’s fine to be excited about things, but leave the “Our Biggest Sale Ever” to the spammers.  Don’t exaggerate or over-promise.  You’re an adult.  Your customers are adults.  Act accordingly.

Send as often as you can create something you’d appreciate receiving yourself.

I get asked a lot how often can you send email without wearing out your welcome.  The headline to this section is really the best answer.  It’s about quality.  When you have something important or interesting to say, say it.  I try to avoid Mondays and Fridays for obvious reasons.  I receive emails from Seth Godin every day.  They’re terrific.  I receive emails from copyblogger.com maybe once a week.  They’re terrific.  As long as you worry more about keeping them terrific, how often you send will take care of itself.

Build value in your emails, don’t sell. . .or, more to the point, sell by building value.

The more value you deliver, the stronger the selling results.  I tell people to imagine being a paid coach of the people receiving your emails.  How can you best educate this group in bite-size pieces?  That’s your email campaign.  What questions are you getting from your customers lately?  Answer those.  What’s going on in their world you can help them understand, give advice around or link to an article about?  If you still aren’t sure about content, subscribe to some email updates by competitors and from companies you admire, regardless of industry.  It would be a great use of time to spend a month receiving emails before you start yours.

If you are having a sale, promote it.  If you’ve lowered a price, announce it.  If you have a new product, let people know.  But keep those types of emails to about 20-30% of the total.

Present the entire story in the email.

I get asked this a lot too: How long should my email be?  My answer: it should have a beginning, middle and end.  Most people think shorter is better.  Short is good, but not necessarily better than long.  On a good day, 12% of the people who you send to will click through to your website.  On a great day you might double that.  If you want more than 20% of your recipients (at best!) to get the whole story, and you do, don’t make them click to get it.

Include images.

People like pictures.  Very simply, more people will read your email with pictures than without.  The one I use here is by Ward Schumaker.  I also use istock.com, a great site that sells low-cost stock photos and illustrations.

Personalize your emails.

Dear Hamilton is better than Dear Friend.  All the email services allow you to do this, so do it.  With one client we also mention the customer’s salesperson in their emails, which doubled their click-through rate.

That’s it.  Until I get to #9, or until you leave a comment describing something you’ve learned.  Go ahead. . .I’ve love to know what you know.

At its best, relationship marketing delivers enough value to your audience that they keep paying attention to your message often enough that when the time comes to buy what you sell, you get a shot at the business.

At its worst, relationship marketing simply fails.  People don’t understand what you do, they don’t see value in your message, they stop seeing your message; basically, you don’t exist.

My advice?  You HAVE to practice relationship marketing today.  It’s something you should have been doing the past five years.  It’s the only way you can create enough “permission” in your target audience, assuming your target audience are prospects, not current customers, to generate enough frequency to create results.

Phew.  That’s a mouthful.

Here’s what I mean.  The more often you reach out to prospects the more likely you are to land on their desk or in their inbox at a time when they need what you sell.  The more interesting and valuable your contacts, the less “salesy” they are, the more often you can make contact.  And that is true for any form of marketing: online; offline; in the social media space; you name it.

Where this breaks down is, as Dunford reminds us, when you forget the marketing part of relationship marketing.  But, as I point out, people can also stop listening if you get too salesy.

Where is the happy medium?  In the social media space, you might engage in “the conversation” 10 or 15 times to add value for every time you mention a new product or offer.  Much better in this space: attract them to a blog post or page of useful content on your site; use a sidebar or insert on the page to make a related offer.  Example: the page gives business writing tips; the sidebar advertises your business writing seminar.  And don’t for get to make them an offer!

How about email or direct mail?  Use a four or five to one ratio of value-added content to selling content for email.  With direct mail, you can always include an “About Us” panel or section of the piece that tells what you do and makes an offer for your product or service.

I’m a small business marketing consultant who’s called into every conceivable situation, good and bad.  GM has many issues I don’t know about or probably wouldn’t understand if I did that have made the slowdown in demand for cars so devastating.  However, two things have been painfully obvious: if they hadn’t been so married to the profits in big SUVs and trucks, they wouldn’t be in this mess; if they hadn’t been acting in such half measures these past few years, they wouldn’t be in this mess.

Is there a person in American who couldn’t have told GM three years ago the obvious, that the era of big SUVs is coming to an end?  How long ago was gas over $4/gallon?  How long ago was there a waiting list to buy a Prius?

Lesson #1: Embrace reality.  Your marketing will improve if you do.

I don’t fault GM for selling people big SUVs.  I fault them for not at the same time creating a “moon shot” program to develop the types of hybrid and electric cars people wanted and want to buy.  They might argue they have done this.  They haven’t (see Lesson #2 below).  If they had we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Now, forget about GM, they may be too large to fail, but you aren’t.  Nobody’s bailing you out.  So, embrace reality.  If people haven’t slowed down buying what you sell, but the writing’s on the wall that they will, get busy with Plan B.  What will they buy?  Start developing or sourcing that.  Don’t wait.  That’s the GM lesson.

Lesson #2: When you act to solve a marketing problem, make sure you solve the problem.

I heard a GM spokesperson on TV talking proudly about how many cars they have that average over 40 MPG and touting their new hybrids.  That’s just pathetic.  First, nobody’s buying those 40 MPG cars, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.  Second, GM’s newest hybrids (at least the ones they’re spending millions promoting): Escalade and Tahoe.

If so many good people weren’t losing their jobs because of management’s stupidity, introducing a hybrid Escalade would be laughable.  Seriously, a hybrid Escalade. Gee, is that like low-fat bacon?

So, if you have a problem to solve, make sure your solution is a solution.

I always ask the “zero-based” question at times like these: if you were starting over, right now, in your space, what product would you sell, how would you sell it and who would you invest money in promoting it to?  That’s what you should be doing right now, not introducing a hybrid Escalade.

The answer to the “what product would you sell?” part of that question sounds an awful lot like, in GM’s case, the Chevy Volt, right?  All electric, good range, looks cool.  Except it’s too expensive and way, way late.

Again, if you have a problem to solve, make sure your solution is a solution.  And again, forget about GM.  But nobody’s going to bail you out except you.  So, embrace the reality you’re in, and when you act, make sure you make changes that are big enough to make a difference.  And please, no Escalade hybrids!

I’m rooting for the new Palm Pre.  I get nervous when I see more hype or buzz than anything else about a product as it launches.  Present a great product as a revolutionary life-changing product and you may kill it.  That’s why I try to practice balancing realistic expectations and buzz.

Palm is hyping the crap out of the Pre.  Countdowns, sexy spinning images of the product and over-produced video demos.  Careful fellas (ladies too)!  By all measures the Pre is a great phone.  I owned one of the first Palm Treos and liked it very much.  I own an HTC Touch Pro and am very happy with it.  Both great phones.  But if you had hyped either product as “touched by God,” I would have been disappointed.

My advice to Palm: get information out about the Pre, lots of it.  Set expectations.  Educate people in addition to getting them excited.

We’re in the middel of launching a great new Plantronics wireless headset for a Plantronics distributor Headsets Direct.  The Savi WO100.  Terrific product: let’s you take land line and VoIP calls on the same headset; longer wireless range; simple to install; solid sound quality.  My inclination is to hype the daylights out of it because it really is a great product (it’s replacing two of my headsets).  I hope I stop well short of the “touched by God” expectation.  If I do, we’ll probably sell more of them.

Remember the old political quip from Bill Clinton’s first campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid”?  It was written throughout his HQ to remind everyone the economy was the central issue of the campaign.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for linking to Thomas Baekdal’s post Where Is Everybody? in which Baekdal creates a graph (reproduced here) that shows how much how we communicate with each other has changed.  It also makes my marketing quip, “It’s the Message, Stupid!”, even more obvious.

My point: don’t forget your marketing message!!

Everybody’s all hyperventilated about whether they should focus on Twitter, continue to blog, give more time to LinkedIn, Facebook, FriendFeed, DIGG and on and on and on.  The same way I imagine they hyperventilated about newspapers, magazines, radio and TV, as the electronic word began to overtake the printed word.

It’s the message, stupid!  Yes, be mindful of how you communicate.  No, that isn’t enough to be successful.  If you have nothing to say or a me-too product, you simply won’t get much traction or notice or attention, regardless of which social medium you employ.

Does the medium change the message?

Sure.  But only the scale, you still need a message that resonates with your target audience.  Imagine yourself a marketer in 1967 tasked with selling Admiral refrigerators.  You just finish this nifty full-page ad in Life magazine and they want you to do a TV commercial.  How do you cram all that information into a short TV spot?!  Good question.  And actually, the answer is you don’t.  You need to take the core of your message and work with that.

Fast forward. . .you can’t even fit that nifty headline into a 140-character tweet!!  How about a 95-character Adwords ad!

Be where your customers and prospects are going for their information.  Clearly, that includes social media.  But make sure you also focus on the message.  Being at the right place isn’t enough.

As a small business marketing consultant I’m called into companies more often when things are bad.  These days, however, things are different.  I first wrote about the slowdown in December of 2007, warning small business owners to check their marketing message (as economic conditions change, so do buying motivations).

What’s the most powerful marketing question for today?  It’s the question you should be asking your top customers: 

How can I help you get through this mess?

Think about it.  If a vendor came to you and asked you this question, how would you feel?  Like they were on your side, like they cared, like they are in this with you.  Well, guess what, we’re all in this together.  What happens to your customers happens to you.  Eventually.

So, start asking this question and you’ll get some interesting answers.

// A NON-AD is something that doesn’t feel like an ad.  It informs.  It has value. 

It becomes an ad when it causes action.

You know what I’m talking about.  A white paper.  A report.  A guide.  An article reprint.  Something you can do for prospective customers that has as its goal to inform, to add value.  Now that’s a non-ad ad. 

Because if you can inform and deliver value, you can persuade.  Correct?  You don’t always have to “advertise” to advertise, right?  Take the video below, it’s a good example.

 [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwfJqCI74t4[/youtube]

This is a video by a respected member of his industry talking about what his organization feels is important about software that manages cases in forensic laboratories.  If you work in a forensic lab you’d learn some things about how to select case management software.  The company that paid us to create the video, JusticeTrax, is never mentioned.  The video obviously is on their site.  The implication is the software he uses is theirs, but it is designed to help someone in the early stages of considering this type of software.

You know what I mean.  You just need a reminder to plug this type of non-ad into your marketing and advertising program.  So, consider yourself reminded!